Post by GLRuk on Feb 2, 2009 4:11:09 GMT 1
Taken from NIR/PWR forum (http://invanddis.proboards29.com/)
I found this most interesting...
I found this most interesting...
Adorno....did research into 'the me' factor in musical recordings.
'the me' factor...as in the listener.
In 1963, the Beatles arrived in the United States, and with their decisive airing on the Ed Sullivan Show, the "British sound" took off in the U.S.A. For their achievement, the four rocksters were awarded the Order of the British Empire (I thought it was MBE's tbh) by Her Majesty the Queen. The Beatles and the Animals, Rolling Stones, and homicidal punk rock maniacs who followed were, of course, no more a spontaneous outpouring of alienated youth than was the acid culture they accompanied.
The social theory of rock was elaborated by musicologist Theodor Adorno, who came to the United States in 1939 to head the Princeton University Radio Research Project.17 Adorno writes: "In an imaginary but psychologically emotion-laden domain, the listener who remembers a hit song will turn into the song's ideal subject, into the person for whom the song ideally speaks. At the same time, as one of many who identify with that fictitious subject, that musical I, he will feel his isolation ease as he himself feels integrated into the community of "fans." In whistling such a song he bows to a ritual of socialization, although beyond this unarticulated subjective stirring of the moment his isolation continues unchanged . . . The comparison with addiction is inescapable. Addicted conduct generally has a social component: it is one possible reaction to the atomization which, as sociologists have noticed, parallels the compression of the social network. Addiction to music on the part of a number of entertainment listeners would be a similar phenomenon."18
The hit parade is organized precisely on the same principles used by Egypt's Isis priesthood and for the same purpose: the recruitment of youth to the dionysiac counterculture.
In a report prepared for the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research, Paul Hirsch described the product of Adorno's Radio Research Project.19 According to Hirsch, the establishment of postwar radio's Hit Parade "transformed the mass medium into an agency of sub-cultural programming. Radio networks were converted into round-the-clock recycling machines that repeated the top forty hits." Hirsch documents how all popular culture -- movies, music, books, and fashion -- is now run on the same program of preselection. Today's mass culture operates like the opium trade: The supply determines the demand.
The "Radio Research Project"
As Lippmann was writing, the radio, the first major mass media technology to invade the home, was coming into prominence. Unlike the movies, which were viewed in theaters by large groups of people, the radio provided an individualized experience within the home, and centered on the family. By 1937, out of 32 million American families, some 27.5 million had a radio set--a larger percentage than had cars, telephones, or even electricity.
That same year, the Rockefeller Foundation funded a project to study the effects of radio on the population. [8] Recruited to what became known as the ``Radio Research Project,'' headquartered at Princeton University, were sections of the Frankfurt School, now transplanted from Germany to America, as well as individuals such as Hadley Cantril and Gordon Allport, who were to become key components of Tavistock's American operations. Heading the project was the Frankfurt School's Paul Lazerfeld; his assistant directors were Cantril and Allport, along with Frank Stanton, who was to head the CBS News division, and later become its president, as well as chairman of the board of the RAND Corporation.
The project was presaged by theoretical work done earlier in the studies of war propaganda and psychosis, and the work of Frankfurt School operatives Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. This earlier work had converged on the thesis that mass media could be used to induce regressive mental states, atomizing individuals and producing increased lability. (These induced mental conditions were later dubbed by Tavistock itself as ``brainwashed'' states, and the process of inducing them called ``brainwashing.'')
In 1938, at the time he was head of the music section of the Radio Research Project, Adorno wrote that listeners to radio music programs:
'' fluctuate between comprehensive forgetting and sudden dives into recognition. They listen atomistically and dissociate what they hear.... They are not childlike, but they are childish; their primitivism is not that of the undeveloped, but that of the forcibly retarded.''
The Radio Research Project's findings, published in 1939, backed up Adorno's thesis of ``enforced retardation,'' and serve as a brainwashers' handbook.
In studies on the serialized radio dramas, commonly known as ``soap operas'' (so named, because many were sponsored by soap manufacturers), Herta Hertzog found that their popularity could not be attributed to any socio-economic characteristics of listeners, but rather to the serialized format itself, which induced habituated listening. The brainwashing power of serialization was recognized by movie and television programmers; to this day, the afternoon ``soaps'' remain among the most addictive of television fare, with 70% of all American women over 18 watching at least two of these shows each day.
Another Radio Research Project study investigated the effects of the 1938 Orson Welles radio dramatization of H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, about an invasion from Mars. Some 25% of the listeners to the show, which was formatted as if it were a news broadcast, believed that an invasion was under way, creating a national panic--this, despite repeated and clear statements that the show was fictional. Radio Project researchers found that most people didn't believe that Martians had invaded, but rather that a German invasion was under way. This, the researchers reported, was because the show had followed the ``news bulletin'' format that had earlier accompanied accounts of the war crisis around the Munich conference. Listeners reacted to the format, not the content of the broadcast.
The project's researchers had proven that radio had already so conditioned the minds of its listeners, making them so fragmented and unthinking, that repetition of format was the key to popularity. [9]
After listening all day..... to the 'top forty'....I now, can't wait for the next installment of 'Eastenders'.
Bring it on.....
;D ;D ;D
'the me' factor...as in the listener.
In 1963, the Beatles arrived in the United States, and with their decisive airing on the Ed Sullivan Show, the "British sound" took off in the U.S.A. For their achievement, the four rocksters were awarded the Order of the British Empire (I thought it was MBE's tbh) by Her Majesty the Queen. The Beatles and the Animals, Rolling Stones, and homicidal punk rock maniacs who followed were, of course, no more a spontaneous outpouring of alienated youth than was the acid culture they accompanied.
The social theory of rock was elaborated by musicologist Theodor Adorno, who came to the United States in 1939 to head the Princeton University Radio Research Project.17 Adorno writes: "In an imaginary but psychologically emotion-laden domain, the listener who remembers a hit song will turn into the song's ideal subject, into the person for whom the song ideally speaks. At the same time, as one of many who identify with that fictitious subject, that musical I, he will feel his isolation ease as he himself feels integrated into the community of "fans." In whistling such a song he bows to a ritual of socialization, although beyond this unarticulated subjective stirring of the moment his isolation continues unchanged . . . The comparison with addiction is inescapable. Addicted conduct generally has a social component: it is one possible reaction to the atomization which, as sociologists have noticed, parallels the compression of the social network. Addiction to music on the part of a number of entertainment listeners would be a similar phenomenon."18
The hit parade is organized precisely on the same principles used by Egypt's Isis priesthood and for the same purpose: the recruitment of youth to the dionysiac counterculture.
In a report prepared for the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research, Paul Hirsch described the product of Adorno's Radio Research Project.19 According to Hirsch, the establishment of postwar radio's Hit Parade "transformed the mass medium into an agency of sub-cultural programming. Radio networks were converted into round-the-clock recycling machines that repeated the top forty hits." Hirsch documents how all popular culture -- movies, music, books, and fashion -- is now run on the same program of preselection. Today's mass culture operates like the opium trade: The supply determines the demand.
The "Radio Research Project"
As Lippmann was writing, the radio, the first major mass media technology to invade the home, was coming into prominence. Unlike the movies, which were viewed in theaters by large groups of people, the radio provided an individualized experience within the home, and centered on the family. By 1937, out of 32 million American families, some 27.5 million had a radio set--a larger percentage than had cars, telephones, or even electricity.
That same year, the Rockefeller Foundation funded a project to study the effects of radio on the population. [8] Recruited to what became known as the ``Radio Research Project,'' headquartered at Princeton University, were sections of the Frankfurt School, now transplanted from Germany to America, as well as individuals such as Hadley Cantril and Gordon Allport, who were to become key components of Tavistock's American operations. Heading the project was the Frankfurt School's Paul Lazerfeld; his assistant directors were Cantril and Allport, along with Frank Stanton, who was to head the CBS News division, and later become its president, as well as chairman of the board of the RAND Corporation.
The project was presaged by theoretical work done earlier in the studies of war propaganda and psychosis, and the work of Frankfurt School operatives Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. This earlier work had converged on the thesis that mass media could be used to induce regressive mental states, atomizing individuals and producing increased lability. (These induced mental conditions were later dubbed by Tavistock itself as ``brainwashed'' states, and the process of inducing them called ``brainwashing.'')
In 1938, at the time he was head of the music section of the Radio Research Project, Adorno wrote that listeners to radio music programs:
'' fluctuate between comprehensive forgetting and sudden dives into recognition. They listen atomistically and dissociate what they hear.... They are not childlike, but they are childish; their primitivism is not that of the undeveloped, but that of the forcibly retarded.''
The Radio Research Project's findings, published in 1939, backed up Adorno's thesis of ``enforced retardation,'' and serve as a brainwashers' handbook.
In studies on the serialized radio dramas, commonly known as ``soap operas'' (so named, because many were sponsored by soap manufacturers), Herta Hertzog found that their popularity could not be attributed to any socio-economic characteristics of listeners, but rather to the serialized format itself, which induced habituated listening. The brainwashing power of serialization was recognized by movie and television programmers; to this day, the afternoon ``soaps'' remain among the most addictive of television fare, with 70% of all American women over 18 watching at least two of these shows each day.
Another Radio Research Project study investigated the effects of the 1938 Orson Welles radio dramatization of H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, about an invasion from Mars. Some 25% of the listeners to the show, which was formatted as if it were a news broadcast, believed that an invasion was under way, creating a national panic--this, despite repeated and clear statements that the show was fictional. Radio Project researchers found that most people didn't believe that Martians had invaded, but rather that a German invasion was under way. This, the researchers reported, was because the show had followed the ``news bulletin'' format that had earlier accompanied accounts of the war crisis around the Munich conference. Listeners reacted to the format, not the content of the broadcast.
The project's researchers had proven that radio had already so conditioned the minds of its listeners, making them so fragmented and unthinking, that repetition of format was the key to popularity. [9]
After listening all day..... to the 'top forty'....I now, can't wait for the next installment of 'Eastenders'.
Bring it on.....
;D ;D ;D