Jesse Walker on the Hidden History of Multimedia

As the U.S. was
fighting World War II, a group of social scientists thought they
could create a different sort of propaganda, one that didn’t treat
Americans like an obedient mass. Instead they just came up with a
subtler sort of manipulation. The Democratic
Surround, a fascinating new history by the Stanford historian
Fred Turner, traces that group’s influence over the next two
decades. In the process, Jesse Walker writes, Turner finds
unexpected links between undertakings as different as the U.S.
Information Agency’s Cold War campaigns and the Human Be-In, one of
the most famous hippie festivals of the ’60s.  

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