Pre-covid

A book that presents itself. Published just before the Covid-19 crisis, it reveals the techniques of mass manipulation that were employed during that crisis by governments and the mainstream media to gain public support for human rights abuses.

Film made in the framework of a training course in film making for teachers, animated by Benoît Labourdette and proposed by Clair Obscur.

This is the book: “Propaganda. Mass manipulation in the contemporary world” by David Colon, Flammarion, 2019.

Book presentation text

“Fake news”, “infox”, “post-truth”: the contemporary world does not cease to be confronted with the challenges of mass information. We thought propaganda disappeared with the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, but in the era of the digital revolution and social networks, it is more present and more effective than ever. Every day brings its share of disinformation, manipulation, rumors and conspiracy theories.

Far from being limited to the political sphere and to the “factory of consent”, propaganda today permeates all aspects of our life in society, as marketers, storytellers and nudge theorists strive to influence our choices and behaviors.

Spanning more than a century of history and a vast geographical area, David Colon explains the foundations and techniques of mass persuasion in the contemporary world. He shows that propaganda has continued to improve as social sciences and neurosciences have improved the effectiveness of persuasion, influence and manipulation techniques.

Through an accessible and powerful synthesis, David Colon delivers an essential contribution to better understand the ravages caused by disinformation, yesterday and today.

In the field of “media and information literacy (MIL)”, there are, in my opinion, two schools of thought among sociologists, which appear more evident after the Covid-19 crisis (2020-2022):

• Those who, like David Colon, have a critical perspective on all the messages that circulate in the public space, whether they emanate from small groups seeking to have influence or from the spheres of power (economic, political and media).
• Those who, like Gérald Bronner (author of “Apocalypse cognitive”, PUF, 2021), have a critical point of view that is solely oriented towards messages that question official information. Gérald Bronner had moreover accepted to chair a commission on disinformation created in 2021 by Emmanuel Macron (president of the French Republic), at the height of the Covid-19 crisis: “Les Lumières à l’ère numérique”.

At first glance, these two approaches may appear to be similar, since they employ similar analytical tools, but on closer inspection, we discover that their objectives are in fact opposed: on the one hand, the free-thinking intellectuals, defenders of a critical spirit on all subjects, including themselves, and on the other hand, the paid experts, bearers of a pseudo-critical spirit designed to discredit the opponents of those who fund them.

This nuance between intellectual and expert is very important. The intellectual can risk his social position for his ideas, as Hannah Arendt did, whereas the expert remains an employee, thus consolidating his social power. The difficulty in distinguishing the two lies in the fact that experts pass themselves off as intellectuals, and sometimes even believe it themselves. That’s why it’s always a good idea to take a close look at the employers/financiers/links of interest/professional backgrounds of public figures, which often influence them without them even realizing it.

It’s up to us to be critical and clear-sighted about the context and the interests that may be served by a discourse, whoever its author may be. For example, the use of the label “conspiracy theorist” for people who legitimately questioned health policy during the Covid-19 crisis, was first and foremost an indicator of a lack of critical thinking or even blindness on the part of those who employed it, such was the crassness of the state’s lies, which has now been proven. And yet, these people were often acting in good faith. That’s why it’s important to contextualize the speech, to understand where the person is speaking from. In those days, the issue was not to be excluded from one’s social context, particularly one’s job, and this often happened in people’s subconscious, tetanized by fear, which they didn’t perceive was constructed by propaganda.