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Showing posts from October, 2013

Demassification of Media and Society: Re-Envisioning Toffler

Well known journalist and author, Thomas Friedman may have popularised the phrase “flat world” in his award winning book “The World is Flat” to advocate the idea of globalisation but two decades earlier, Alvin Toffler had already conceptualised and prophesied the revolutionary changes in the 21st century – a global society that is being shaped and fuelled by communication technology. It should be obvious that Toffler is not the only futurist around. There are dozens of other scholars and authors who have produced similar kind of works. But none has captured the public’s imagination as powerful as Toffler’s. It has been 33 years since the publication of Alvin Toffler’s most celebrated futurist book, “The Third Wave” (first published in 1980), widely considered as the most important publication in Toffler’s trilogy, which included “Future Shock” (1970) and “Power Shift” (1990). It is timely that we re-look and re-evaluate some of its major themes, especially in the context of new media

Nazi Propaganda and the Volksgemeinschaft: Constructing a People’s Community - Journal Review

Here's another ancient unpublished article. "There are probably hundreds of books and journals on Nazi propaganda, but at least one that is brief and worth mentioning is the one by David Welch, "Nazi Propaganda and the Volksgemeinschaft: Constructing a People’s Community", published in the Journal of Contemporary History, 2004. The purpose of this paper is to study how did the Nazi attempted to influence public opinion by means of propaganda, to analyse the key themes of propaganda and to observe whether or not there is a gap between the image of society in Nazi propaganda and social reality. All this were done by analysing the responses from two major sections of the community – the industrial workers and German youth. One of the key themes of Nazi propaganda was to influence the public opinion through propaganda. According to David Welch, he wrote that the concept of national or people’s community (Volksgemeinschaft) was a key element in the ‘revolutionary’ a