Different media have projected various issues about our lives in various ways. It is no doubt that the opinion and the views of the public can easily be swayed (or controlled) by manipulating the content on the various media artifacts. People's opinions can be shaped by what their views are on a certain issue. Since there are many different kinds of media in the world and since different people prefer different media as their source of information, the choice of media and the way the issue of information security is presented in each media is very important in making decisions as well as shaping people's ideas and attitudes. “There are 260,000 billboards; 11,520 newspaper; 11,556 periodicals; 27,000 video outlets for renting video tapes; more than 500 million radios; and more than 100 million computers. Ninety-eight percent of American homes have a television set, 40,000 new book titles are published every year (300,000 worldwide), and every day in America, 41 million photographs are taken. And if this is not enough, more than 60 billion pieces of junk mail (thanks to computer technology) find their way into our mailboxes every year” (Neil Postman). These statistics can thus provide an overview of the bulk of information that is available to the people. It can also be derived that each kind of media would therefore have a different kind of effect on the people. Each media would present the issue of information security in a different way and each would have a different point of view. Al these things combined would then determine the attitude that the public holds for or against various issues. It is also important to realize that using this media as a social control is not just an urban myth, but a reality that occurs almost everywhere in the world.
Perhaps the one word that summarizes this kind of a media control is propaganda. Many would appropriate some negative connotations with this word, ala George Orwell's 'big brother is watching. The United States government has been using media in order to change and control the views of the public ever since the Second World War. When the primary concerns of all the politicians and generals of the United States during World War II were directed towards winning the war, the immediate government at home was lobbying to portray certain elements on the local television and media in order to win a different battle, the war in the entertainment realm (Culbert1983, 173; Barkin1984, 119). Many movies and animated movies were made during that time whose subject matter was the war. There were many major cartoon studios in America that used to work on contractual basis for the military. The famous Warner Bros. had productions that were especially wrought for the Navy - which starred a character named Hook, and MGM had Bertie the Bomber. But the one cartoon that got the most critical of acclaim was military cartoon series that starred U.S. Army's Private Snafu. The name 'Snafu' is actually an acronym that when decoded reads: 'Situation Normal - All Fouled Up'. Many believe that the word 'Fouled' actually represents the variation on the four-lettered 'F' word. Snafu also has two brothers: Tarfu ('Things Are Really 'Fouled' Up') and Fubar ('Fouled Up Beyond All Recovery'). Theodor Geisel (who later became famous as Dr. Seuss) created Private Snafu and Phil Eastman and these people wanted to personify him as having certain very counterproductive behavior. This was done so that the people in the army would know exactly what it was that they should not ever do (Dow).
It is widely believed that the U.S. Army used such and more cartoons as tools for propaganda ever since. When there was a boom in the electronic industry in the early twentieth century and equipment such as radio and television were invented, the governments and others saw this as a great opportunity to spread their word along to the masses in a way that was easy and also had a very large scope in terms of its reach; tens of people can watch one television at the same time and information can be parleyed over large distances without having to physically get up and go there. The end of the First World War saw a great refinement to such tools as radio and television and many producers - such as Leni Riefenstahl and his pro-Nazi production Triumph of the Will - had started to use this media as a propagating tool by the beginning to the Second World War. The United States also made many films including Why We Fight and of course, Private Snafu. Snafu was well liked and immediately accepted by the people and “Warner Bros. cartoon studio produced twenty-six 'Private Snafu' cartoons for the U.S. Army Signal Corps between 1943 and 1945. The cartoons were made in such a way that they represented the global presence of the United States and their army as Snafu would be shown to be in m
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