The Various Approaches of Propaganda

Propaganda

Propaganda is a concept which involves using various communication approaches to convey or communicate massive information. Thus it is about information communication. And those approaches of propaganda can be ranging from books, newspaper, to the modern Media, television, movies whatever things that can contain and deliver information. However it is slightly different from other general idea of communication. It is not served for fully communicating information to the receiver, instead of hindering and even distorting it with the purpose of influence on the attitudes, cognitions and stands of the public to certain affairs, in order to provide chances for the specific groups or a person to gain benefits. Given this propaganda becomes a tool for political and different interest groups.

The various approaches of propaganda can be seen in two parts. One is the intentional part that message senders will deliberately try to distort the information to against receivers. Reversely to see that in another part, distortion of information is not purposely conducted by the message senders. Instead, it is altered due to the difference of message senders own knowledge, emotions. And the message senders will also deliver their thoughts to receivers, not some constructed false or incomplete information.

The features of propaganda include mutability and adaptability. In other words, propaganda is easily changing and shifting its approaches by different audience, situation, cultural and social context. It has extended almost every parts of our life. In some circumstances, it appeared to be indirect approaches in communication, such as legal restriction, rules of information accessing and spreading, like the government censorship. I think one of prominent examples is the Chinese government censorship of internet. It has blocked many websites from outside of China by accusing those websites containing the political dissonance and threatening the social stability. Therefore, propaganda can be either spreading information or restricting on it.

Propaganda is also an effective, useful toolkit to identity making. First, it can be adopted to create similarity for people by spreading social conceptions, cultures, ideals and so on through various propaganda approaches. When it is done, collective identity of people will emerged and this kind of propaganda is often used by political groups or government. Another way is to create the image of enemy and using propaganda to strengthen this image, such as the war propaganda. And it is also about countering rivals’ propaganda by consolidating propaganda system of itself and setting up barriers to against others.