"Mind Games & Activism: Marketing, Persuasion and the Myth of the Hardwired Public" Stuart Ewen

ase join us this Thursday, October 1 for a presentation by author, historian, and media/culture theorist Stuart Ewen.

The intersection of semiotics and psychoanalysis has proven fruitful terrain for PR professionals, advertisers, politicians, and other types of leaders. Over the course of a century those whose job it is to persuade the public have increasingly abandoned appeals to rationale in favor of appeals to emotion. Instead of trying to persuade with text and reason, they use imagery and symbols to appeal to instinct and emotion.

Ewen will tour us through the history of "spin", propaganda, and the role of images in consumerism, mass psychology, politics, social movements, cultural attitudes, and consumption. PR is a battle to define reality, and how people see and understand that reality. In this presentation, we will explore what it means to do battle armed with the tools of persuasion.

Thursday, October 1, 7:30pm (free/by donation) The Change You Want To See Gallery http://thechangeyouwanttosee.org 84 Havemeyer St, @ Metropolitan Ave Brooklyn NY 11211

And live-streamed at http://livestream.com/notanalternative for remote participants

Ewen will build on ideas from his book, PR! A Social History of Spin, and from Adam Curtis’s BBC series, “Century of the Self,” which was loosely based on that book. Ewen will also draw on ideas from his current research for a book to be entitled The Phantom of Certitude: The Folklore of Science in Con temporary Culture. This new work is a critical exploration of the powerful influence of scientific fundamentalism that has been expanding for more than a century and has become a growing fixation in the wake of new genetic and neuroscientific research into the molecular biological mechanisms that allegedly shape and drive all human thought and behavior.