Newspeak

[Superstring]

I was really surprised when I was at the end of high school, doing a project on the effectiveness of propaganda, and finding that googling 'social engineering' turned up far more hits from reprinted CNN stories about people scamming email passwords from strangers. A fine evolution to me though, since propaganda is for the most part ineffective (hate propaganda excluded)

What do you think of newspeak? Do you think anyone these days makes newspeak intentionally?

[Nadiar]

I think its somewhere in the middle, so I voted to restore some balance to the poll.

[Ka.avik]

social engineering is getting the masses to do what you'd like, whether through carefully crafted email scams, or "badly" worded news clips.

I appeared to have reduced the balance, but consider my vote to be a simple yes

[joft]

having read mitnick's "the art of deception," the first definition is the most obvious to me. as for "newspeak," that's kindof what the entire field(s) of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology are about. absolutely, there are professional fields of marketing, which you can go to college to learn how to do, where you study the anthropology, sociology, and psychology of your target group(s), and the nature of transmission of memes and so on, and actively try to find ways to present information that will take advantage of people's cognitive shortcomings and biases. the media does it, politicians do it. just think about all the stupid catchphrases that you'll always remember because of how they repeated them over and over again ("the politics of personal destruction," or "no taxation without representation" if you want an example that also makes the point that this is by no means a new phenomenon)

[Superstring]

social engineering is getting the masses to do what you'd like, whether through carefully crafted email scams, or "badly" worded news clips.

I appeared to have reduced the balance, but consider my vote to be a simple yes

:banghead:

Dammit, my polls always wind up sucking for some reason.
'Both'....