Chapter 2 Further Reading: The Long History of Persuasion Technology

Books

1. Aristotle. Rhetoric. (Translated by W. Rhys Roberts, 2004). Dover Publications. The foundational text in the history of persuasion theory. Despite being written in the fourth century BCE, the Rhetoric remains startlingly relevant to contemporary media analysis. Aristotle's framework of ethos, pathos, and logos provides an analytical vocabulary that maps with surprising precision onto the design logic of contemporary social media platforms. Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand why certain persuasion techniques are ancient rather than modern.

2. Bernays, Edward L. Propaganda. (1928, republished 2005). Ig Publishing. Bernays' own account of his approach to public relations and mass persuasion. Disturbing, sophisticated, and surprisingly honest about its intentions: Bernays explicitly endorses the "conscious and intelligent manipulation" of public opinion as a social good. Required reading for understanding the ideological foundations of the advertising and PR industries, whose techniques underlie contemporary social media marketing.

3. Bernays, Edward L. Crystallizing Public Opinion. (1923, republished 2011). Ig Publishing. Bernays' earlier theoretical account of public relations, less confrontational than Propaganda but equally revealing about the systematic, psychologically informed approach to persuasion that Bernays pioneered. Read alongside Propaganda for a complete picture of his thinking.

4. Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. (2019). PublicAffairs. The most comprehensive scholarly account of the economic logic of behavioral data collection and commodification. Zuboff traces the development of what she calls "surveillance capitalism" from its origins in Google's advertising model through Facebook's social graph and beyond. Dense but invaluable; the theoretical framework is indispensable for understanding how the historical development described in Chapter 2 has arrived at its contemporary form.

5. Wu, Tim. The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads. (2016). Knopf. The closest existing parallel to the argument of Chapter 2 in book form. Wu traces the history of the attention economy from nineteenth-century newspaper advertising through radio, television, and the internet, arguing that each medium has essentially the same underlying business model: aggregate human attention and sell it to advertisers. Accessible, historically rich, and directly relevant to the chapter's central argument.

6. Ewen, Stuart. PR! A Social History of Spin. (1996). Basic Books. A comprehensive social history of the public relations industry, with substantial focus on Bernays and his contemporaries. Ewen places the development of PR in the context of the broader history of consumer capitalism and mass persuasion, providing historical depth that enriches the chapter's account of the Bernays era.

7. Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. (1985). Viking. Postman's influential critique of television as a medium that, by its structural nature, reduces public discourse to entertainment and spectacle. Written in 1985, it is prophetic about the direction of media development. The argument that the medium shapes the message — and that the television medium systematically degrades the quality of public communication — applies with equal or greater force to social media. An important intellectual predecessor to contemporary concerns about algorithmic media.

8. Herman, Edward S. and Chomsky, Noam. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. (1988). Pantheon. Herman and Chomsky's structural critique of mass media, arguing that advertising-supported media systematically produce content that serves the interests of corporate and political elites. The "propaganda model" they develop is, in many ways, an elaboration of Bernays' own account of how media functions — though Herman and Chomsky would reject Bernays' endorsement of that function. Essential context for understanding the political economy of the attention economy.

9. Gitlin, Todd. Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives. (2001). Metropolitan Books. An exploration of what Gitlin calls the "media torrent" — the overwhelming quantity of mediated content that characterizes contemporary life. Written at the dawn of the social media era but prescient about its consequences. Gitlin's concept of "media saturation" and its psychological effects provides useful context for the history traced in Chapter 2.

10. McChesney, Robert W. Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy. (2013). New Press. A political economy of the digital media landscape that traces the structural connections between the commercial logic of the internet and the attention economy's historical development. McChesney's argument that the commercial colonization of the internet was not inevitable — that it was a policy choice that could have been made differently — is an important corrective to technological determinism.

Academic Articles and Papers

11. Fogg, B.J. "Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do." Ubiquity (2002). DOI: 10.1145/764008.763957. An early and influential account of what Fogg called "captology" — the study of computers as persuasive technologies. Fogg's work, including his later research on behavioral design, is important both for its insights and for its role in providing a theoretical framework that was subsequently used by platform designers to justify and optimize engagement-maximizing design. Required background for understanding the intellectual history of persuasive technology.

12. Lazer, David, et al. "The Science of Fake News." Science, 359(6380), pp. 1094-1096 (2018). DOI: 10.1126/science.aao2998. A landmark review of research on misinformation spread online, relevant to the chapter's discussion of how algorithmic optimization for engagement amplifies emotionally charged, often inaccurate content. The authors document that false news spreads faster and farther than true news on social media, a finding that connects directly to the chapter's argument about emotional manipulation and engagement optimization.

13. Brady, William J., et al. "Emotion Shapes the Diffusion of Moralized Content in Social Networks." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(28), pp. 7313-7318 (2017). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1618923114. Empirical research documenting that morally charged emotional language significantly increases the spread of content on social media. This finding provides scientific evidence for the mechanism that the chapter traces historically: emotional content (especially outrage) maximizes engagement. The research connects Aristotle's pathos, Hearst's sensationalism, and Facebook's engagement optimization into a single empirical story.

14. Goldhaber, Michael H. "The Attention Economy and the Net." First Monday, 2(4) (1997). DOI: 10.5210/fm.v2i4.519. One of the earliest uses of the term "attention economy" in the context of digital media. Goldhaber's analysis, written before social media existed, presciently identified attention as the scarce resource that would be monetized in the digital economy. A foundational document in the intellectual history of how we think about online platforms.

15. Turow, Joseph. "The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry Is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth." Yale University Press (2011). Turow's account of how behavioral advertising works — how advertisers use data to target individuals, how this process defines and limits the information environment individuals encounter, and what it means for concepts of privacy and autonomy. Essential context for understanding the chapter's discussion of AdWords and behavioral data.

Journalism

16. Cadwalladr, Carole. "The Great British Brexit Robbery: How Our Democracy Was Hijacked." The Guardian, May 7, 2017. The investigation that first brought Cambridge Analytica to wide public attention, revealing how behavioral data harvested from Facebook was used for targeted political persuasion at scale. A case study in how the historical development described in Chapter 2 has arrived at its contemporary political consequences.

17. Statt, Nick. "Instagram's New Algorithm Explained." The Verge, June 2, 2016. A contemporary journalistic account of Instagram's transition from chronological to algorithmic feeds, including the platform's stated justifications and early user reactions. A useful primary source document for the chapter's discussion of the shift from chronological to ranked content delivery.

18. Tufekci, Zeynep. "YouTube, the Great Radicalizer." The New York Times, March 10, 2018. Tufekci's influential essay on how YouTube's recommendation algorithm systematically drives users toward increasingly extreme content, applying the chapter's broader argument about engagement optimization to a specific platform. The piece is important both for its analysis and for its role in stimulating subsequent academic research into algorithmic radicalization.

Online Resources

19. The Century of the Self. Directed by Adam Curtis. BBC, 2002. Available at various archives. A four-part BBC documentary about the influence of Sigmund Freud's ideas on twentieth-century mass manipulation, with Edward Bernays as a central figure. The most accessible introduction to Bernays and his legacy available in video form. Watching this documentary is strongly recommended alongside the chapter's Case Study 01.

20. "The Persuaders." Frontline. PBS, 2004. Available at pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/persuaders. A Frontline documentary examining contemporary advertising and marketing techniques, providing a bridge between the historical account in Chapter 2 and contemporary practices. Includes interviews with advertising executives that reveal, with unusual candor, how the industry thinks about emotion, identity, and behavior.