With the invention of the printing press and - as a consequence - the distribution of information in masses (by then already mostly in the shape of propaganda), propaganda could change its methods. It could not only be produced but also reproduced and therefore spread widely.
The Protestant Reformation profited by this. The idea of translating the Bible into local languages was successful, because it got possible for many people to get a Bible, as books no longer were affordable only for the nobles and the Church.
Royalty and the Courts realized that prestige asked for propaganda and that it was impossible to reign over the people if their mood turned against the king. This gave the impetus for acting. Pamphlets were used for spreading royal messages; like the so-called "mazarinades" (
When - in
From that time on propaganda and manipulation were carried out for the most different political ideas and nearly without frontiers. Censorship - a part of disinformation - seems to have been the only barrier then. Sometimes even the source of a message kept hidden, which was part of the disinformation process. It is easier to spread ideas against somebody if the own name is kept hidden; and speaking out some kind of laudation that the own party is better without mentioning that it was oneself who spread it and therefore claim that it was someone else who praised the very idea.
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"For propaganda is a communicative process of persuasion, and persuasion remains an integral part of human discourse in peace as well as in war. (...) propaganda is a process unique to human communication regardless of time, space and geographic location." (
The word propaganda is coming from the Catholic Church. In the 17th century the word was used in the fights against the Protestant Reformation (see
Propaganda is using words - of course. But it furthermore uses a huge variety of tools for putting through its purpose. Some of them are: hymns, marches, parades, flags, colors, uniforms, all the typical insignias of the military are pieces of propaganda. And it is no coincidence that the standardization of the uniforms for the army were an invention of
Propaganda makes us think and act in a way we probably would not have chosen to without its influence. Still, in most cases the degree of influence is impossible to know. Studies proving the efficiency of propaganda are doing nothing else but guessing in big parts. But it is efficient, that we know for sure. This is true for commercial advertisements as well as for political propaganda. Short messages are the most effective form of propaganda, look at posters for elections or at advertisements for any product.
The best or most effective propaganda is that which is wanted by the people. If propaganda meets the needs of the people then it has good chances to be extremely effective. And of course those needs can be "educated", as Jacques Ellul mentioned already in 1957, in his book Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes.
Political will suffers from the urgency of spreading propaganda. The will to change something - even if it was for the better - is hopelessly lost, if their is no prestige or aura around an idea. A certain amount of disinformation and propaganda is the perfect tool to get ideas through.
So, actually, what is the difference between disinformation and propaganda?
One difference is that the first one is directed at reason whereas propaganda also touches emotions, most of the time even prefers to influence emotions.
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As soon as governments found out that newspapers were a fantastic and very often unsuspicious medium for supporting propaganda they tried to pull them to their side.
Two ways existed:
a) to have one's own newspaper, which implies that mostly friends of the government read it. Nothing is regarded as something neutral.
b) to keep a good relationship to the most powerful/most frequently read newspapers and then try to make one's opinion theirs.
Today mostly elected is b), trying to set up alliances.
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The British set up a unique system for propaganda, involving GB, the USA and all the colonies. Most different agencies and civilians worked together, the civilians not always knowing about the machinery behind.
During the first years of the war the main goal was to achieve a U.S.-entry to the war on Britain's side of the battle. All propaganda was working on this, which meant to destroy Germany's reputation and create dark stereotypes about them, which was an easy task as the Germans were not only fatally unlucky but also very weak in propaganda. At the same time the U.S.-citizens' opinion about the war had to be influenced. The most promising way to do so was by starting with the men in power.
One of the most beloved tools at that time was the use of atrocity stories; and most popular among the masses were cartoons, furthermore posters, an element perfectioned by the USSR in World War I and II, and movies.
The particular thing was that British propaganda finally had an effect on the German population. Soldiers at the front and people at home received the disinformation messages, mostly pamphlets that had been dropped by aeroplanes or balloons.
Together with the development of the fightings turning against the Germans this kind of propaganda was able to discourage the people and make the German government lose its power of propaganda.
"Allied propaganda had caused a collapse of morale at home." (
After all this success it is hardly understandable that the British committed a huge error right after the war, an error that had bad consequences for the next war: being regarded as a tool of war and therefore regarded as inappropriate for times of peace, the propaganda institutions were closed. At about the same time similar ones were built up in Germany - first of all on paper, in
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"Although this is a free society, the U.S. mainstream media often serve as virtual propaganda agents of the state, peddling viewpoints the state wishes to inculcate and marginalizing any alternative perspectives. This is especially true in times of war, when the wave of patriotic frenzy encouraged by the war-makers quickly engulfs the media. Under these conditions the media's capacity for dispassionate reporting and critical analysis is suspended, and they quickly become cheer-leaders and apologists for war." (words as propaganda, by
The mass-media would have a possibility to get out of this circle of being disinformed and making others disinformed. To admit that oneself is not always informed correctly, and also mention that the pictures shown are not in any case suitable to the text, as some of them are older, or even from another battle.
For the media it would be easy to talk about the own disinformation in public. Doing this would provoke the government or in the case of the
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The magic word is credibility.
Disinformation can mean leaving out important informations. Telling lies is not the only method of disinformation. The not telling also creates thoughts and delegates them into certain directions, whereas other models of thinking are left out.
Like this, the deaths on the own side are adjusted downwards whereas the victims of the enemy are counted proudly - as long as they are not civilians. The post-Gulf War period demonstrated how the population reacts if the number of innocent victims is much higher than expected. It was the fact of those numbers that provoked the biggest part of the post-war critique.
The media in democratic states tend to criticize this, which does not mean that they always want to be free of governmental influence. They can choose to help the government in a single case by not writing anything against it or by writing pro-government stories.
At the same time every democracy has undemocratic parts in it - which is already part of democracy itself. There are situations when a democratic government may find it essential to put pressure on the media to inform the population in a certain way; and also censorship is nothing that can only be connected to dictatorship; just think of the Falkland War, the Gulf-War or the Kosovo-War.
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In the beginnings of Christianity most people were illiterate. Therefore the Bible had to be transformed into pictures and symbols; and not only the stories but also the moral duties of everybody. Images and legends of the Saints turned out as useful models for human behavior - easy to tell and easy to understand.
Later, when the crusades began, the Christian Church used propaganda against Muslims, creating pictures of evil, pagan and bloodcurdling people. While the knights and others were fighting abroad, people in Europe were told to pray for them. Daily life was connected to the crusades, also through money-collections - more for the cause of propaganda than for the need of money.
During the period of the Counter-Reformation Catholic propaganda no longer was against foreigners but turned against people at home - the Protestants; and against their publications/books, which got prohibited by starting the so-called index. By then both sides were using disinformation for
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Disinformation was seen as an appropriate tool of politics and rhetoric in ancient Greece. Most of all persuasion was used, which then was considered a type of art.
Religion was (and in many ways still is) the best disinformer or manipulator; prophecies were constructed to manipulate the population. The important thing was to use emotions and more than anything else fear as a tool for manipulation. If the oracle of Delphi said a war was to fight and would be won, then the Greek population - because of religious motives - was prepared to fight that war.
Propaganda was not only used in wars but also in daily life to bring people together and create a nation.
But poets, playwrights and other artists were manipulating as well. Their pieces of literature and plays were full of political messages with different ideologies behind. In the way how theatre at that time was part of life, it can be understood easily that those messages had not only entertainment's character but also a lot of political and social influence.
A different and very famous part of disinformation in ancient Greek history was the story of
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By the end of our century a new method of disinformation is gaining importance: disinformation by an overflow of information.
In the Gulf War, similar to the Vietnam War, journalists had little chance to report neutrally and correctly from the battlefields. Many times they staid in places far from the actual fightings - due to censorship.
In many ways the so-called video-war reminded of a series of commercials. No wonder, the Gulf War was the first war to have a commercial advertisement agency to do the war-propaganda for the USA. They worked hard in preventing the government from a destiny like the one of the Vietnam War, when the war most of all was lost in the American homes because of anti-war propaganda.
In an interview,
And this is true for both sides:
the baby milk plant:
Western bombs had destroyed a chemical weapon factory - that's what they claimed.
(
the life guard:
In December 1990, the French newspaper Nouvel Observateur published the story of Karim Abdallah al-Jabouri, Saddam Hussein's Life Guard who had fled from Iraq right after Iraq's invasion in Kuwait. Soon afterwards he was in a French TV-show, where he told atrocity stories about
the baby-incubator-story of Najirah
On the 10th of October 1991 a young refugee, called Najirah, from Kuwait spoke in front of the U.S.-congress. With a lot of tears she told that she had been working in a Kuwaiti hospital, when Iraqi soldiers came in, tore the babies out of the incubators and let them die on the floor. The pictures of this declaration went around the world and were one of the reasons why the U.S.-population wanted an intervention. In 1992 the journalist R. MacArthur was able to proof that the presented witness had been the daughter of the Kuwait-ambassador in the USA and that she had not been in that hospital or in Kuwait at the mentioned time.
By then the war was over and the manipulation of the population had taken place long ago.
For reading about the U.S.-propaganda tools during that war, like surrender passes, balloons, fake banknotes, threats and many more visit:
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Disinformation is part of human communication. Thousands of years ago it was already used as a political medium. In the age of mass-communication and information its possibilities have grown tremendously. It plays an important role in many different fields, together with its "companion" propaganda. Some of these fields are: politics, international relations, the (mass-)media and the internet, but also art and science.
There is no evidence at all for a disappearance of disinformation. On this account it is important to understand where it comes from, what its tools are and how nations (democratic as well as totalitarian systems), international organizations and the media work with it or against it.
This report tries to give a short insight into this topic:
on a theoretical level
by demonstrating cases of disinformation, like the 2nd Chechnya War in 1999.
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In 1870 the U.S.-American
for further details see:
Those who believe in it, call it the truth, those who simply like the idea, may call it a parallel science. Others call it disinformation, asking for the reasons to spread it. The turning to the inside, where there is no way out, produces a different reality. It shows that realities are always produced.
Political conservatives and racists like
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Political and economic agendas change. People leave, get exchanged. Whereas one of the things that never seem to change is disinformation. Watching different kinds of cultures and regimes throughout history you will always find disinformation.
Its use is variable just like its tools. First of all it does not necessarily need words. It is possible to disinform in any kind of language (sounds, symbols, letters or with the help of the body). As it seems to have come into existence together with human communication, we need not even hope that it will disappear once in a while.
One could rather say: disinformation has always been there.
Instead of hoping to stop it we need to learn to live with it, detect it, restore it to consciousness. Even this will not be any insurance for not walking into the trap. It is an attempt, nothing else.
For detecting disinformation one needs to know what types of disinformation are possible and how they work. This site gives you some ideas about the history, tendencies and different types of disinformation, with the restriction that it will mostly be about the Western types of disinformation, as it is still harder to understand the media of disinformation in other cultures; and anyhow, many methods and tools run parallel in different cultures.
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Disinformation might also be welcome:
While the ones criticize disinformation and try to fight against it, others do nothing against it. And others again seem to enjoy getting disinformed. How this works? It is the result of a society that does no longer want to live under the pressure of doing and hearing everything at the same time. Acceleration of life seems too fast. The only way to get out is to refuse certain things/messages/truths. Receiving disinformation can be more comfortable than getting so-called correct information. This is especially true for the readers of the yellow press. The yellow press lives on that perspective, the commodity of getting light news, mostly wrong news and lies - but those being wrapped up in nice pictures and stories about those who seem to reign the world.
The aim is the escape out of reality.
A surplus of information, information terror, can produce disinformation. The profusion can get exploited for disinformation. This works in that way that in the mass of information the individual has no possibility to get an overview of the different ways of thinking and to reach a stage of objective knowledge.
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Network information centers are organizations responsible for registering and maintaining the domain names on the
According to the
Artificial Intelligence is concerned with the simulation of human thinking and emotions in information technology. AI develops "intelligent systems" capable, for example, of learning and logical deduction. AI systems are used for creatively handling large amounts of data (as in data mining), as well as in natural speech processing and image recognition. AI is also used as to support
Yahoo AI sites:
MIT AI lab:
b. December 3, 1903, Budapest, Hungary
d. February 8, 1957, Washington, D.C., U.S.
Mathematician who made important contributions in quantum physics, logic, meteorology, and computer science. His theory of games had a significant influence upon economics. In computer theory, von Neumann did much of the pioneering work in logical design, in the problem of obtaining reliable answers from a machine with unreliable components, the function of "memory," machine imitation of "randomness," and the problem of constructing automata that can reproduce their own kind.
A gateway is a computer supplying point-to-multipoint connections between computer networks.
To perform manufacturing firm's functions related to design and production the CAD/CAM technology, for computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing, was developed. Today it is widely recognized that the scope of computer applications must extend beyond design and production to include the business functions of the firm. The name given to this more comprehensive use of computers is computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM).
b. Nov. 2, 1815, Lincoln, Lincolnshire, England
d. Dec. 8, 1864, Ballintemple, County Cork, Ireland
English mathematician who helped establish modern symbolic logic and whose algebra of logic, now called Boolean algebra, is basic to the design of digital computer circuits. One of the first Englishmen to write on logic, Boole pointed out the analogy between the algebraic symbols and those that can represent logical forms and syllogisms, showing how the symbols of quantity can be separated from those of operation. With Boole in 1847 and 1854 began the algebra of logic, or what is now called Boolean algebra. It is basically two-valued in that it involves a subdivision of objects into separate classes, each with a given property. Different classes can then be treated as to the presence or absence of the same property.
The story of Frank-N-furter, Brad and Janet ... Don't dream it, be it!
http://www.rockyhorrorpictureshow.com/
Noam Chomsky (* 1928) works as a U.S.-linguist, writer, political activist and journalist. He is teaching at the MIT (= Massachusetts Institute of Technology) as a professor of linguistics, specializing on structural grammar and the change of language through technology and economy - and the social results of that. When he stood up against the Vietnam War he became famous as a "radical leftist". Since then he has been one of the most famous critics of his country.
Also "Angelic" language. Archaic language alphabet composed of 21 letters, discovered by John Dee and his partner Edward Kelley. It has its own grammar and syntax, but only a small sample of it has ever been translated to English.
Expert systems are advanced computer programs that mimic the knowledge and reasoning capabilities of an expert in a particular discipline. Their creators strive to clone the expertise of one or several human specialists to develop a tool that can be used by the layman to solve difficult or ambiguous problems. Expert systems differ from conventional computer programs as they combine facts with rules that state relations between the facts to achieve a crude form of reasoning analogous to
FTP enables the transfer of files (text, image, video, sound) to and from other remote computers connected to the Internet.
The 1996
b. June 23, 1912, London, England
d. June 7, 1954, Wilmslow, Cheshire
English mathematician and logician who pioneered in the field of computer theory and who contributed important logical analyses of computer processes. Many mathematicians in the first decades of the 20th century had attempted to eliminate all possible error from mathematics by establishing a formal, or purely algorithmic, procedure for establishing truth. The mathematician Kurt Gödel threw up an obstacle to this effort with his incompleteness theorem. Turing was motivated by Gödel's work to seek an algorithmic method of determining whether any given propositions were undecidable, with the ultimate goal of eliminating them from mathematics. Instead, he proved in his seminal paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem [Decision Problem]" (1936) that there cannot exist any such universal method of determination and, hence, that mathematics will always contain undecidable propositions. During World War II he served with the Government Code and Cypher School, at Bletchley, Buckinghamshire, where he played a significant role in breaking the codes of the German "
to put the ciphers/codes back into the plaintext
The bandwidth of a transmitted communications signal is a measure of the range of frequencies the signal occupies. The term is also used in reference to the frequency-response characteristics of a communications receiving system. All transmitted signals, whether analog or digital, have a certain bandwidth. The same is true of receiving systems.
Generally speaking, bandwidth is directly proportional to the amount of data transmitted or received per unit time. In a qualitative sense, bandwidth is proportional to the complexity of the data for a given level of system performance. For example, it takes more bandwidth to download a photograph in one second than it takes to download a page of text in one second. Large sound files, computer programs, and animated videos require still more bandwidth for acceptable system performance. Virtual reality (VR) and full-length three-dimensional audio/visual presentations require the most bandwidth of all.
In digital systems, bandwidth is data speed in bits per second (bps).
Source: Whatis.com
|
It is a system, where letters get converted into numeric characters.
The numbers were not written down and sent but signaled with torches.
for example:
A=1-1
B=1-2
C=1-3
W=5-2
for more information see:
Incepted in 1971, The NASDAQ Stock Market was the world's first electronic stock market and has since attracted many technology companies from countries all over the world, some of them as legendary as
NASDAQ is the largest stock market in the world.
Whitfield Diffie is an Engineer at Sun Microsystems and co-author of Privacy on the Line (MIT Press) in 1998 with Susan Landau. In 1976 Diffie and
Industrial design refers to the ornamental aspect of a useful article which may constitute of two or three-dimensional elements. To be qualified for
The telephone was not invented by Alexander Graham Bell, as is widely held to be true, but by Philipp Reiss, a German teacher. When he demonstrated his invention to important German professors in 1861, it was not enthusiastically greeted. Because of this dismissal, no financial support for further development was provided to him.
And here Bell comes in: In 1876 he successfully filed a patent for the telephone. Soon afterwards he established the first telephone company.
Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) is a standard reference model for communication between two end users in a network. It is used in developing products and understanding networks.
Source: Whatis.com
The WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) is a specification for a set of communication protocols to standardize the way that wireless devices, such as cellular telephones and radio transceivers, can be used for Internet access, including
While Internet access has been possible in the past, different manufacturers have used different technologies. In the future, devices and service systems that use WAP will be able to interoperate.
Source: Whatis.com
The North Atlantic Treaty was signed in Washington on 4 April 1949, creating NATO (= North Atlantic Treaty Organization). It was an alliance of 12 independent nations, originally committed to each other's defense. Between 1952 and 1982 four more members were welcomed and in 1999, the first ex-members of
Gaius Julius Caesar (100-44 BC) was a Roman Statesman who came to power through a military career and by buying of votes. His army won the civil war, run over Spain, Sicily and Egypt, where he made Cleopatra a Queen. For reaching even more power he increased the number of senators. But he also organized social measures to improve the people's food-situation. In February 44 BC he did not accept the kingship offered by Marc Anthony, which made him even more popular. One month later he was murdered during a senate sitting.
Built by Remington Rand in 1951 the UNIVAC I (Universal Automatic Computer) was one of the first commercially available computers to take advantage of the development of the
Communications satellites are relay stations for radio signals and provide reliable and distance-independent high-speed connections even at remote locations without high-bandwidth infrastructure.
On point-to-point transmission, the transmission method originally employed on, satellites face increasing competition from
In the future, satellites will become stronger, cheaper and their orbits will be lower; their services might become as common as satellite TV is today.
For more information about satellites, see How Satellites Work (
Themistocles, a Greek politician and general, conquered the Persians in the battle of Salamis, in 480 BC. The Persians, under their King
For further details see:
The ongoing World Wide Web History Project was established to record and publish the history of the World Wide Web and its roots in hypermedia and networking. As primary research methods are used archival research and the analysis of interviews and talks with pioneers of the
http://www.webhistory.org/home.html
Proprietary networks are computer networks with standards different to the ones proposed by the
A branch of
This is the story of the virtual Marylyn Monroe created by MRALab in Switzerland. The biography features her personal and professional stories. This being the biography of a virtual being, it does not end with the present and includes, instead, a chapter on her destiny.
Copyright laws generally provide for three kinds of neighboring rights: 1) the rights of performing artists in their performances, 2) the rights of producers of phonograms in their phonograms, and 3) the rights of broadcasting organizations in their radio and television programs. Neighboring rights attempt to protect those who assist intellectual creators to communicate their message and to disseminate their works to the public at large.
MIRALab is a research laboratory attached to the University of Geneva. Its motto is "where research meets creativity". MIRAlab's objective is to model human functionalities, such as movement or facial expression, in a realistic way.
The "word" Kosov@ is a compromise between the Serb name KosovO and the Albanian KosovA. It is mostly used by international people who want to demonstrate a certain consciousness about the conflict including some sort of neutrality, believing that neither the one side nor the other (and maybe not even
For more explanations (in German) see:
DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is the independent research branch of the U.S. Department of Defense that, among its other accomplishments, funded a project that in time was to lead to the creation of the Internet. Originally called ARPA (the "D" was added to its name later), DARPA came into being in 1958 as a reaction to the success of Sputnik, Russia's first manned satellite. DARPA's explicit mission was (and still is) to think independently of the rest of the military and to respond quickly and innovatively to national defense challenges.
In the late 1960s, DARPA provided funds and oversight for a project aimed at interconnecting computers at four university research sites. By 1972, this initial network, now called the
http://www.darpa.mil
Joseph Stalin (1879-1953):
After Lenin's death he took over and became a dictator without any limits of power. Everyone who dared to talk or act against him or was in suspicion of doing so, got killed. Millions were murdered. His empire was one made out of propaganda and fear. As long as he was in power his picture had to be in every flat and bureau. Soon after his death the cult was stopped and in 1956 the De-Stalination was started, though he was partly rehabilitated in 1970.
General H. Norman Schwarzkopf (* 1934) followed in his father's footsteps at the United States Military Academy at West Point.
In 1965 he applied to join the troops in Vietnam. For the next 20 years Schwarzkopf worked on his career. As Commander in Chief of the U.S. Central Command, he led U.S. and allied forces in the Gulf War (Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm). He retired from the Army in 1992 and wrote his autobiography.
For a picture see:
A server is program, not a computer, as it sometimes said, dedicated to store files, manage printers and network traffic, or process database queries.
Web sites, the nodes of the
The research and development division of
http://www.research.att.com/