Introduction to Language and Power
Questions to get you thinking!
1. How does language work—or fail to work—and, why?
2. How do people use language to generate influence and control?
3. What processes underlie the formation of a powerful or powerless
impression, and how are these processes related to speech features?
Activity:
Can you think of any words that are ok
in one language and offensive in
another?
Propaganda
Propaganda - information, especially of a biased or misleading
nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view.
Propaganda is a form of communication aimed towards influencing the attitude of a
population toward some cause or position.
Propaganda is information that is not impartial and used primarily to influence an
audience and further an agenda, often by presenting facts selectively (thus possibly
lying by omission) to encourage a particular synthesis, or using loaded messages to
produce an emotional rather than rational response to the information presented.
While the term propaganda has acquired a strongly negative connotation by
association with its most manipulative and jingoistic examples (e.g. Nazi propaganda
used to justify the Holocaust), propaganda in its original sense was neutral, and
could refer to uses that were generally benign or innocuous, such as public health
recommendations, signs encouraging citizens to participate in a census or election,
or messages encouraging persons to report crimes to law enforcement, among
others. READ THROUGH PROPAGANDA BOOKLET
Propaganda
Questions for Consideration
Since propaganda is a topic that is so highly misunderstood and difficult to define, here are some
questions might be relevant in understanding the overall nature of this issue:
1) Where do you generally draw the line between persuasion and propaganda?
2) Do you feel that your education used propagandistic techniques to create consensus (for
example, in high school history textbooks? How so?
3) Do you think propaganda can at times be used in positive ways?
4) Is it necessary, to some degree, to keep people in the dark (specifically when it comes to
policy decisions made by the government)?
5) Does human psychology make us susceptible to propaganda, or is its use a byproduct of the
society we live in?
6) How much responsibility should the public take in educating themselves, and how
responsible are the media and government for providing accurate information?
7) What do you think would be the effects of having a well-informed, critically thinking public?