A short excerpt from Al Gore's new book is below. I only had faint interest in his book until I read several paragraphs like this. Now, the book is coming to me via Amazon and I can't wait for it to get here. Here's the short excerpt and link to full excerpt below:

"As a college student, I wrote my senior thesis on the impact of television on the balance of power among the three branches of government. In the study, I pointed out the growing importance of visual rhetoric and body language over logic and reason. There are countless examples of this, but perhaps understandably, the first one that comes to mind is from the 2000 campaign, long before the Supreme Court decision and the hanging chads, when the controversy over my sighs in the first debate with George W. Bush created an impression on television that for many viewers outweighed whatever positive benefits I might have otherwise gained in the verbal combat of ideas and substance. A lot of good that senior thesis did me.

The potential for manipulating mass opinions and feelings initially discovered by commercial advertisers is now being even more aggressively exploited by a new generation of media Machiavellis. The combination of ever more sophisticated public opinion sampling techniques and the increasing use of powerful computers to parse and subdivide the American people according to “psychographic” categories that identify their susceptibility to individually tailored appeals has further magnified the power of propagandistic electronic messaging that has created a harsh new reality for the functioning of our democracy."

Full excerpt --
Book Excerpt: "The Assault On Reason" by Al Gore



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That's a wrap! Say it with video!
Nerissa Oden
www.TheVideoQueen.com

©2007 Nerissa Oden
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