The Issue
Lippmann’s main observation is that for different reasons humans create “pseudo-environments” and respond with certain behaviors based on their reaction to said pseudo-environments.
Major Strength
This theory and observation holds great merits and is sometimes not realized by the general public, that our views and opinions could be skewed by misinformation, not knowing all the facts, or be given wrong facts, on purpose or by accident. This is important to think about when digesting information which Lippmann proposes that we do constantly and that we should be aware of it. Following chapter 1 with the topic of Privacy was important to me as a major strength of the reading because it reinforced the main issue in the very particular topic of government propaganda.
Major Weakness
A concern of mine on the reading would be that Lippmann seems to assume, or only propose how peoples Public Opinion or public opinion (because there is a difference apparently), is misleading and in all the examples he gives the information that the people have consumed is wrong and misguides their response. If this is the case then as a reader its hard for me to believe that he isn’t misguiding me or giving me false information. He says that in the rest of his book he will explain how humans so often are mislead by the pictures inside their head that affects their dealings with the outside world. What I’m trying to get at is that if I can’t trust the information I’m digesting then how can I trust the words on the page I’m reading. It seems somewhat counterintuitive.
Underlying Assumption
I’ve mentioned a little bit in my other answers but the major assumption to be made from this reading is that humans should be more aware of certain aspects of information that they are given. Lippmann supports this assumption by explaining propaganda and how it misleads humans into believing, and therefore reacting in misguided ways. This also does not just happen in politics, Lippmann introduces in Chapter 1 several different topics of how this occurs that he will be explaining later in his book. (These include: “artificial censorships, the limitation of social contact, the comparatively meager time available in each day for paying attention to public affairs, the distortion arising because events have to be compressed into very short messages, the difficulty of making a small vocabulary express a complicated world, and the fear of facing those facts which would seem to threaten the established routine of men’s lives.”)
Provocative Questions
Is their some psychological explanation for why humans feel the need to purposefully misguide others into believing certain things? Can this phenomena explained by fixed-action pattern theory that we read previously? Lippmann explains that in order for a propaganda to take place their has to be some sort of barrier that separates the information from the receiver, and because all of his examples are very old this barrier seems to be extremely large…How small is this “barrier” today?