Effective propaganda requires total coordinated use of all available media

Evidence

Mainly, though, it was no single invention that marked the government’s effort so much as its massive scale and organization. In this, the British anticipated an insight that would be expressed by the French philosopher Jacques Ellul halfway through the twentieth century: to succeed, propaganda must be total. The propagandist must utilize all of the technical means and media available in his time—movies, posters, meetings, door-to-door canvassing in one century, social media in another, as the rise of ISIS attests. Where there is only sporadic or random effort—a planted newspaper article here, a poster or a radio program there, a few slogans sprayed on walls—this modern form of attention capture does not bear its once unimagined fruit. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 146

Categorization

• XREF: Ellul’s ‘propaganda must be total’ anticipates modern attention-industrial platforms; connects to the reader’s surveillance/platform interest. — connects to: WWI propaganda pioneered totalizing capture of every available medium — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 156
• SEED: Could anchor an essay on how the same total-media principle underlies modern attention harvesting by platforms.

Broader Connections

• WWI propaganda pioneered totalizing capture of every available medium #exemplifies (0.82) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 156