Television, newspapers, radio, songs, internet: all of these are mass media present in today’s society. Everybody has access to them and is inevitably confronted to them in everyday life. As a consequence, everyone is influenced. Their effects on the people are undeniable. The development of such media has led to the development of new sciences s

Propaganda is a way to influence and manipulate people’s opinions, to make them think as one wants them to. Propaganda messages are mainly broadcasted thanks to media or advertisements. Although a neutral term in its original sense, it has acquired since WWII, a negative connotation (especially after the Nazi propaganda).Consequently, we are not

The phenomenon of mass attraction exercised with Hollywood, the Marilyn Monroe Lady in Red among other things is a "deja vu" kind of mass seduction, even if, in our time and especially in the 20th century, it takes another pattern, wearing the coat of growing modernity at the time. The Baroque era had witnessed the time of "beauties of holiness", w

Thinking is useless, or that is, at least, the way people in Huxley’s Brave New World “think” (if we may use this term, considering the fact that we just said that they don’t). If people have such an idea of the act of pondering, it is precisely because everything is made for them to have plenty of other entertaining things to do. As a dire

Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1931. This is no coincidence he wrote such a dystopia at that time. Indeed, capitalism and mostly mass culture were booming in Europe: culture was becoming more and more accessible and affordable to everyone. To start with, cinema developed and became cheaper, allowing (almost) everyone to enjoy it. Newspapers

Our contemporary Western society, in spite of its material, intellectual and political progress, is increasingly less conducive to mental health, and tends to undermine the inner security, happiness, reason and the capacity for love in the individual; it tends to turn him into an automaton who pays for his human failure with increasing mental sickn

In his essay Brave New World revisited, Huxley gives a strong definition of dictatorship, of manipulation, and above all, sheds light on the contrast between two types of mass control. This is a quite important point of the study as long as it gives us an outline of Huxley’s ideas and of the situation exposed in Brave New World. Aldous Huxley obs

Having an opinion on something means having access to various different sources of information, in order to think about it, and form a judgment. In the past, not so long ago, there used to be a diversity of points of view and ideas in mass culture. But now, the conglomeration of media companies has led to the standardization of the cultural landsca

In Brave New World, Huxley depicts a society in which people are totally manipulated. To create such a controlled world, media play a key role in the story. One of the means used to control people in the dystopia (meaning here an undesirable fictional society) is hypnopedia. Hypnopedia is the name given to a method that consists in hammering in a m

The “World State’s motto” in Brave New World is the most relevant and obvious example of the existence of a unity of thinking in its society. Indeed, based on the French “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” (“Freedom, Equality, Brotherhood”), Huxley creates for his despotic society the following motto: “Community, Identity, Stability