WALTER LIPPMANN’S THEORY OF PUBLIC OPINION FORMATION. Throughout the 1930s, many other members of the social elite, especially those at major universities, shared Lasswell’s vision of a benevolent social science–led technocracy. They believed that physical science and social science held the keys to fighting totalitarianism and preserving democracy. As such, Lasswell’s work commanded the attention of leading academics and opinion leaders, including one of the most powerful opinion makers of the time—Walter Lippmann, a nationally syndicated columnist for the New York Times. Lippmann shared Lasswell’s skepticism about the ability of average people to make sense of their social world and to make rational decisions about their actions. In Public Opinion (1922), he pointed out the discrepancies that necessarily exist between “the world outside and the pictures in our heads.” Because these discrepancies were inevitable, Lippmann doubted that average people could govern themselves as classic democratic theory assumed they could. The […]
Effects of Information Technologies
With the existing new technologies and innovations emerging every other day, the information technology is an increasingly interesting platform not just for developers, but also for all sorts of non-technical common people. With the need for making things easier in the daily life and with the technological advancements, more and more daily activities are shifting online. Having said this, the web can be a very useful tool as well as an intimidating proposition at the same time. Computer based technology and information systems are actually quite large and vast spread in their utility, have broader spectrum and details. For instance when anyone uses the web for browsing, sending or receiving e-mails, playing online games or even sharing multimedia files with others, all the data has to pass through a set of complicated networks and soft-wares. There are many processes involved that are responsible for management of such systems. The prime […]