Liza Featherstone in Divining Desire: Focus Groups & the Culture of Consultation shares with journalist Chris Hedges how advertising techniques developed by early Viennese intellectual elites were adapted and coopted by US elites to control politics, consumption and opinion.
Watch the full interview here.
BackStory is a public radio program & podcast that brings historical perspective to the events happening around us today. On each show, renowned U.S. historians Ed Ayers, Peter Onuf, and Brian Balogh tear a topic from the headlines and plumb its historical depths. Over the course of the hour, they are joined by fellow historians, people in the news, and callers interested in exploring the roots of what’s going on today.
Watch the full interview here.
Watch the full interview here.
What can we know of our fellow citizens? The question is at root philosophical or epistemological. In the peculiar climate fostered by the Trump regime, however—not to mention the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal—it has also become a political one. Everything from the trustworthiness of social scientific indicators to the facticity of the news media to the techniques by which candidates reach voters is now subject to suspicion. The means by which we know “the public” is, today, a central public debate.
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The interview with Liza begins after 21:00 here.
Can you tell us a bit about how focus groups came to be?
At every turn, focus groups have been developed or further perfected to bridge a vast divide between a group of elites and the people they want to convince. We find this just as much with left-wing elites as with our current depraved ruling class.
In fact, the focus group was developed during Red Vienna, a period when the city, despite a very conservative national government, was run by socialists. The Viennese socialist leadership was very much a cultural elite — they were the intellectuals, the psychoanalysts. They had ideas about what socialism should be but were very out of touch with the working class. These elites held a lot of socially conservative views, like the working class shouldn’t have sex outside of marriage or drink, they should play team sports and listen to classical music. The working class wasn’t particularly interested in those ideas, so there was this disconnect.
Read the full interview at Jacobin.
Consumer capitalism and the focus group appear to go hand in hand. But Liza Featherstone argues that the focus group has radical origins and, in convoluted ways, points to the potential for collective input in an egalitarian society. She discusses the history of focus groups for consumer goods and electoral politics.
Listen to the full interview on KPFA.
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