The engineering of consent

Persuasion is the art, primarily verbal, by which you get somebody to do what you want and make him at the same time think that this is what he had wanted to do all the time.

It may be objected that the person persuaded — the persuadee, shall we call him? — may not be persuaded actually to "do" anything, but merely to accept an opinion or adopt an attitude. Within certain limits this objection is reasonable, but there is no clear-cut line between belief, atti­tude, and feeling on the one side, and an action on the other. Furthermore, as soon as we look at the characteristic occasions on which persuasion takes place, we see that the process is usually tar­geted, at short or long range, toward action. You persuade the child to be good and go to bed, you persuade the policeman not to give the ticket, you persuade the prospective customer to buy the car, and you persuade the voter to vote for you.

The persuader wants something that can be granted by the persuadee, and if he is successful, it is granted and the persuadee is happy in the granting. Persuasion is the

"engineering of consent". It is a way of exercising power without creating a feeling of anger.

In the past the occasions of public persuasion were not numerous. Today such occasions are multiplied a thousandfold, but numerous as they are, they are lost in the more massive manifesta­tions of persuasion that pour from printing presses, crowd the television screen, fill the airwaves, and cover the landscape as our automobiles race down the highways.

The engineering of consent is central to our democratic, industrial society. We live in the age of the advertising man, propaganda expert, and motivation analyst. What was once a limited exercise is now frequent and universal, and the stakes played for go higher every day. The political, psycho­logical, social, and moral consequences are not yet fully clear. Even so, some observers are begin­ning to feel that there is serious cause for concern that the responsible forms of persuasion will be driven out by the irresponsible.

TEXT #17

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Satellite

Any small body orbits a larger one. Natural satellites that orbit planets are called moons. The first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, was launched into orbit around the Earth by the USSR in 1957. Artificial satellites can transmit data from one place on Earth to another or from space to Earth. Satellite applications include science, communications, weather forecasting, and military use.

Space probes have been sent to natural satellites including the Earth's Moon, Mars's Deimos, and the moons of the giant planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

At any time, there are several thousand artificial satellites orbiting the Earth, including active satellites, satellites that have ended their working lives, and discarded sections of rockets. The brightest artificial satellites can be seen by the naked eye. Artificial satellites eventually re-enter the Earth's atmosphere. Usually they burn up by friction, but sometimes debris falls to the Earth's surface, as with Skylab and Salyut 7.

Hundreds of millions of pieces of space junk, ranging from particles a millimeter across up to disabled satellites, are careering around the Earth. The US Space Command catalogues the larger items to make sure they are not mistaken for enemy missiles; currently about 10,000 items are listed.

Satellites in polar orbit usually complete an orbit in two hours or less and as the Earth is rotating as they orbit, they cover a large part of the Earth's surface each day. Remote-sensing satellites, such as Landsat, are in polar orbit.

The British satellite Prospero continues to orbit the Earth every 100 minutes and will do so until 2040. With the correct equipment, the satellite's radio transmitter can still be heard broadcasting on 137.56 MHz.

TEXT #18

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