Course Goals.

• First, the student should gain a working knowledge (that is the ability to recognize, apply and critique) of the basic strategies and tactics of propaganda.
• Second, the student should be able to engage in meaningful discussion of propaganda as a social phenomenon, an economic phenomenon, and a phenomenon of symbolic interaction.
• In other words, the student should know propaganda when he/she sees it, know how to use it, know how to respond when it is being used on him/her, and be able to explain to and discuss with others issues related to propaganda.

• what they desire
• what they expect
• how they ask for, demand or otherwise communicate to others the content of their desires and expectations.

In other words, propaganda in the modern world is more involved in the framing of questions than in the provision of answers. Propagandists seek to define the tastes, consumption patterns, fears and anxieties of their target mass-audiences so as to make more predictable the behaviors of those mass-audiences. As such the "consumers" of propaganda are also participants (with varying degrees of intentionality) in their own persuasion.

The forms of modern propaganda still include subterfuge and misdirection--its messages still employ "glittering generalities" "plain folk appeals" and the rest of the traditional pantheon--but it relies more and more on the stimulation of vague and undefinable ambiguities and insecurities through the use of emotion-laden abstractions and reason-bending "pseudo-logics." The modern propaganda campaign is almost always composed of a myriad of small messages, created in and transmitted through many integrated and coordinated media and stress complicity instead of compliance.