Charles R. Acland

Swift Viewing: The Popular Life of Subliminal Influence

Since the late 1950s, the idea that hidden, imperceptible messages could influence mass behavior has been debated, feared, and ridiculed. In Swift Viewing , Charles R. Acland reveals the secret story of subliminal influence, showing how an obscure concept from experimental psychology became a mainstream belief about our vulnerability to manipulation in an age of media clutter. He chronicles the enduring popularity of the dubious claims about subliminal influence, tracking their migration from nineteenth-century hypnotism to twentieth-century front-page news. His expansive history of popular concern about subliminal messages shows how the notion of “hidden persuaders” became a vernacular media critique, one reflecting anxiety about a rapidly expanding media environment. Through a deep archive of eclectic examples, including educational technology in the American classroom, mind-control tropes in science fiction, Marshall McLuhan’s media theories, and sensational claims in the late 1950s about subliminal advertising, Acland establishes the subliminal as both a product of and a balm for information overload.

HAROLD INNIS, CULTURAL POLICY, AND RESIDUAL MEDIA

Harold Innis resides as a defining figure for the disciplinary coherence of communication studies, economic history and cultural history in Canada. And yet, he remains largely unknown abroad. This paper reassesses his contributions to cultural policy studies through an examination of Innis’s historical argument about technology, knowledge and power. Whereas he has been understood typically as a rigid technological determinist, this paper argues that Innis charted social relations as products of multiple historical forces. He proposed a model for studying the layering of the new and the old in technological and cultural life. Moreover, his analysis accounted for uneven development, showing how certain technologies can become root elements in the construction of empires. In sum, Innis’s thought alerts us to the way the administration of cultural policy decisions creates the context for further initiatives.