Rebranding the World (Picture)
Rebranding the World (Picture)
Drawing on the theoretical insights of Martin Heidegger’s text “The Age of the World Picture,” this chapter argues that the League of Nations operated as a veritable multinational advertising firm. In that frame, it focuses on the League’s use of information technology in its efforts to influence “world public opinion.” As the chapter shows, the League made tremendous efforts to gather, process, and disseminate its message of peace and international cooperation on a global scale. While the chapter looks at a number of publicity efforts, it pivots on the League’s creation of a series of lanternslides created to depict a particular “world picture,” that in fact corresponded to a precise global distribution of power and resources. As the chapter shows, pushback against the League’s “world picture” tended to take the form of nationalist sentiment and, in particular, passionate cries for the more tangibles “truths” of blood, of race, and of homeland. Yet, states and private interest groups did not want to rip up the cables, stop the presses, and retreat to caves and the use of smoke signals. Rather, they fought for the right to shape and control the messages reaching the public and the means of delivering them.
Keywords: world picture, laternslides, primordialism
Chicago Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
