BA DA BING

This is an article reprinted from Badaboom Gramaphone #3 by Jon Elliston.

Hidden Persuasion?
For the average American, there was plenty to be afraid of in the 1950s. Rock ‘n’ Roll. Reefer madness. The atom bomb. “Red” China. The Soviets and their spacecraft Sputnik. As people in the United States struggled to make sense of a rapidly changing world, a controversial breakthrough in broadcast technology called “subliminal projection” pushed the national paranoia index through the roof.

Advertisers, it seemed, were incredibly adept at scripting their pitches, slogans, and brand names. In fact, according to a popular 1957 book by Vance Packard, advertising firms had probed the psychology of buying so thoroughly that they now knew exactly what made consumers tick.

In The Hidden Persuaders, Packard sounded the alarm over the rise of the “professional persuaders”—ad men who applied psychology and social science to sales. The “depth approach,” as it was called, was based on extensive “motivational research” (MR) financed by the advertising industry. Packard describes how many advertisers, including some of the largest firms in the country, were using MR to concoct new ways of marketing goods and intensifying buying habits, methods that pushed the margins of acceptable persuasion.

Packard emphasized the deceptive nature of the new techniques: “Large-scale efforts are being made, often with impressive success, to channel our unthinking habits, our purchasing decisions, and our thought process…Typically these efforts take place beneath our level of awareness; so that the appeals which move us are often, in a sense, hidden.” Packard’s book introduced thousands of Americans to the latest advances in advertising, and generated unprecedented scrutiny of the manipulators of Madison Avenue.

Among the new MR specialists Packard profiled was the enterprising James Vicary, the man whose scales scheme would kick off decades of subliminal scares in the United States. Vicary had conducted MR on various groups of shoppers, and attracted some attention for his studies of the eye-blink rate of female customers in various stare settings. (Vicary sought to use the blink rate to gauge shoppers’ interest in products and displays.)

In late 1957, Vicary announced that he had designed a subliminal projection machine, capable of flashing unnoticeable messages within big-screen movies. Many people reacted skeptically when first hearing the technique, asking, “What’s the point of an ad you can’t see?”

But Vicary claimed to have conducted a six-week test run at a theatre in Fort Lee, New Jersey that caused a noticeable increase in sales. The message “Eat Popcorn” and “Drink Coke” blipped on the screen every five seconds throughout the feature films, but so briefly they were not consciously perceived by the viewers. Vicary said that the subliminals increased sales of cola by 18% and of popcorn by 58%.

Though Vicary did not produce many details or records of his experiment, the notion that subliminal communication could affect people’s thinking and actions spread quickly. (Even today, forty years later, no subliminal experiment has replicated the success Vicary claimed to have had with the technique.)

Whatever the effectiveness of Vicary’s machine, the very idea of subliminal persuasion persuaded millions of people that their minds were under assault as never before. Maybe you can’t see subliminals, reasoned many, but you damn sure better watch out for them.

The leaders of the broadcasting industry quickly recognized the fact that whatever gains they might make with subliminal advertising would likely be cancelled out by the rapidly developing stigma associated with the sneaky technique. In November 1957 the National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters asked its 300 member stations to refrain from using subliminals pending “review and consideration” by the group. The memo requesting the ban cautioned that subliminals could frighten consumers and hurt advertisers’ credibility:

“A very serious problem is the reaction of the public to having subliminal advertising thrust upon them. There may well be grave concern over the idea of advertising which affect people below their level of conscious awareness, so that they are not able to exercise conscious control over their acceptance or rejection of the messages.”

The threat was real, according to some notable theorists. British author Aldous Huxley, who wrote A Brave New World and other popular future-looking works, saw subliminal persuasion as a potentially alarming development. “I feel very strongly that we mustn’t be caught by surprise by our own advance in technology,” he told an American TV show. “This has happened again and again in history with technology’s advance, and this changes social conditions and suddenly people have found themselves in a situation which they didn’t foresee and doing all sorts of things they didn’t really want to do.”

The news about subliminals was unsettling, but while many people feared they would be secretly manipulated, others were willing to face the subliminal scourge, come what may. A May 1958 survey of public opinion on subliminals indicated that about 42% of the population had heard of the technique. Of course those who had, 50% said they considered subliminal advertising unethical and 50% considered it ethical. A significant majority—60%—said they would watch television programs even if they knew subliminals were used in the show.

Ralph Haber, the Yale researcher who conducted the survey, concluded that “the fact that half the people who had heard of subliminal advertising thought there would be nothing wrong with it, in spite of the tenor of recent mass media attack on it, shows that the man on the street is not so frightened of subliminal advertising as are the more intellectual writers.” But enough people were spooked by the prospect of subliminals invading their mind that it was only a matter of time before the federal government would be forces to grapple with the issue.

Washington Reacts
The concern over subliminal manipulation spread to Washington, DC, where a handful of legislators launched a brief campaign to eradicate the subliminal menace Republican from Utah, led the congressional charge against subliminals.

In October 1957 Dawson asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to get to the bottom of the “secret pitch” that had reared its ugly hidden head on a New Jersey movie screen. Dawson said the subliminal method, if successful, entailed “worrisome, if not frightening aspects.” For instance, he warned, “put to political propaganda purposes, [it] would be made to order for the establishment and maintenance of a totalitarian government.”

Weeks later, the FCC issued a public notice on subliminal projection stating that “caution in using the new technique would evidence proper regard for the public interest.” Such meager admonitions would not satisfy the likes of Representative Dawson. For months he unsuccessfully prodded the FCC to shut down subliminals for good.

Struggling to allay Congress’ fears and save his subliminal advertising clientele, in January 1958 James Vicary took his subliminal show to the nation’s capital, where several members of Congress and FCC chairman John Doerfer viewed a demonstration of the controversial technique. In a Washington television studio, Vicary showed the group a few minutes of a movie with split-second “Eat Popcorn” messages inserted in the film.

During the screening, Senator Charles E. Potter of Michigan quipped: “I think I want a hot dog.” Jokes aside, Potter said he believed the technique should not be used on television until federal regulations were established.

Vicary took the occasion to downplay the power of subliminals, calling them “a mild form of advertising” and “a very weak persuader.” The man at the center of the subliminal scandal assured his official audience that he would insist that television viewers be informed in advance by stations who were planning to use subliminals. What’s more, said Vicary, whatever power subliminals do have could be put to good use spreading public service messages, like “Fight Polio.”

Throughout the debate over subliminal ads, Vicary said that he would welcome government regulation of his methods, but would challenge any attempt to ban subliminal speech. “We have a freedom to communicate,” he said. “If we get into a hassle, we’ll go to the Supreme Court and some decision will be made.”

Representative Dawson, who also attended Vicary’s subliminal demonstration, remained a vocal opponent of the new technique. In a statement submitted to the congressional record two weeks later, he made the case that the subliminal matter deserved immediate action by the FCC.

“If it does not work, television stations should be so informed,” Dawson said. “If it does work, it should be strictly regulated, if permitted at all. Heaven knows, the blandishments of visible advertising are hard enough to resist. Contemplate if you will the effect of an invisible but effective appeal to ‘drink more beer’ being poured into the subconsciousness of the teenage television viewers.” [Sic.]

Despite Dawson’s pleas, the FCC shied away from regulating subliminals. Chairman Doerfer explained in letters to Dawson that the Commission was uncertain it had the legal authority to ban advertising content, even if it was hidden.

While Vicary visited Washington and the FCC dealt with Dawson, Los Angeles station KTLA announced plans for subliminal telecasts. The station promised that the subsurface messages would be pre-announced to viewers and, at least initially, non-commercial. “We’ll flash on something like ‘Join the Army’ or ‘Give to the March of Dimes,’” said KTLA general manager Lew Arnold. “The next step would be to promote our own shows. Then—and I have a feeling this is a long way off—we might go into the commercial end of it.”

A long way off indeed, as weeks later, the subliminal segments were cancelled before even one was aired. According to the New York Times, news of the planned broadcasts did not sit well with the KTLA viewers, many of whom registered their suspicions about subliminals in letters to the station. In addition to the negative public reaction, the FCC’s vague policy on television broadcast of subliminals forced KTLA to reconsider its venture “beneath the threshold of awareness.”

Meanwhile, America’s neighbors to the north were also delving into the uncharted realm of subliminal perception. In February 1958 the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation announced it had recently attempted its own subliminal persuasion, flashing a hidden message—“Telephone now”—352 times during a half-hour show.

The results were not encouraging for subliminal specialists like James Vicary: of 500 viewers surveyed, only one reported the urge to make a phone call. Many viewers said the broadcast made them real hungry or thirsty.

Such incidents focused additional press coverage on the subliminal method. In an editorial titled, “The Ad That Isn’t There” the New York Times warned that KTLA was “certainly playing with fire” by planning to use subliminal communication. While noting that “no one can say how effective it might be,” the Times argued that “any form of message-delivery that sneaks up on the subject without his consciously seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling or feeling it is an invasion of privacy such as George Orwell hardly dreamed of.”

Vicary Confesses
The man most responsible for the late-1950s subliminal scare later stated that the whole affair was much to do about nothing. In a 1962 interview with Advertising Age, subliminal entrepreneur James Vicary explained that he did not foresee the furor over his technique:

“You know, I first had the idea for subliminal many years ago, but I was ashamed of it. It struck me as a form of high jinks I didn’t want to have anything to do with. I never regarded myself as a wheeler-and-dealer. But years later, there I was in my own business and the people who were putting up the money thought I should stir things up. They thought it was a good time to pull subliminal out of the drawer. Maybe it would help business. The story leaked out to some newspaper guy and we were forced to come out with subliminal before we were really ready…we hadn’t done any research, except what was needed for filing a patent. I had only a minor interest in the company [Subliminal Projection Co.] and a small amount of data—too small to be meaningful.”

Though Vicary’s subliminal research was “too small to be meaningful,” fears of his methods were all too real. But soon advertisers’ interest in subliminals faded—by 1962, the Subliminal Projection Co. was out of business. Vicary lamented over his role in launching subliminal mania, but insisted that he meant well:

“All I accomplished, I guess, was to put a new word into common usage. And for a man who makes a career out of picking the right names for products and companies, I should have had my head examined for using a word like subliminal. I try not to think about it any more…This was a gimmick. But I really thought it would help increase the commercial time for broadcast media by enabling advertisers to reach audiences between the regular commercial breaks—while the show was going on and everyone was sitting there, not leaving the room for a drink of water. We thought we’d put a weak commercial message on. They weren’t annoying and they would be perceived only by those already motivated. Only people on the threshold of awareness would see the message.”

Vicary’s subliminal “gimmick” resulted in far more than just another word added to our vocabulary. His Fort Lee subliminal projection tests have become the stuff of urban legend, and are frequently (if somewhat vaguely) cited by people who profess a belief in the effectiveness of subliminal persuasion.

Though he had planted the seeds of the subliminal uproar, Vicary told Advertising Age that he refrained from using some of the more disturbing tricks from the motivational research arsenal:

“As for those who thought it was all so terrible—well, I had the same reaction when I first thought of it…But then, as a researcher, I’ve always pushed on as far as I could. Why, compared to some schemes that have popped into my head, subliminal is one of the most innocent of schemes. The others? Hell, I buried them.”

Subliminal Sex?
The second wave of widespread worry over secret stimuli hit the United States in 1973, when Wilson Bryan Key’s popular book Subliminal Seduction resurrected the hysteria. Subtitled Ad Media’s Manipulation of a Not So Innocent America, the book charged that the use of hidden messages and images in print ads is widespread and causes millions of consumers to buy more, more, more.

The subliminal mechanism that concerned Key most was the “embed”—a word, slogan, or symbol inserted faintly—so faintly it is not perceived—into advertisements. “You cannot pick up a newspaper, magazine, or pamphlet, hear radio, or view the television without being assaulted subliminally by embeds,” Key claimed.

Key saw a subliminal conspiracy of major proportions at work. Subliminal stimuli “have been regularly used in the North American media for over twenty-five years without anyone getting wise to what was going on,” he wrote. Commenting on the $20 billion then spent annually on advertising, he claimed that “an enormous proportion of this expenditure today is devoted to the research, development, and application of subliminal stimuli with strong sales or manipulative potentialities.”

Subliminals infiltrate our minds so often, Key argued, the “as a culture, North America might well be described as one enormous, magnificent, self-service, subliminal massage parlor.”

Key’s arguments rest on this and other brash claims, such as: “The use of subliminal stimuli as a device for motivating audiences in the various media has reached a high level of technical proficiency,” and “We know, beyond any question, that subliminal stimuli sell products.”

Readers of Keys book will notice that significant questions remain, however. Where is Key’s documentation? Are there no witnesses to the preparation of the embeds? If subliminals are used by virtually every advertiser, why can’t Key quote just one of them on their experience with the tactic? Of the thousands of illustrators and technicians who have allegedly staged the multi-million dollar embedding campaigns, is there not one individual who tired of such deceptions and came forward with the truth?

Apparently not—if there is, Key does not cite that person. One researcher who has asked advertising professionals about the controversial advertising methods has found no evidence of its use. “I’ve surveyed more than a hundred ad directors throughout the country, and not a single one has ever worked on a subliminal ad,” says Jack Haberstroh, a professor of advertising at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Instead of presenting sturdy evidence, Key backs up his case with a hodgepodge of theories from the fields of communication studies, media criticism, and Freudian psychology, along with a heavy dose of his own ruminations on embeds. He sees them virtually everywhere, and believes they are responsible for many a successful as campaign:

“The basis of modern media effectiveness is a language within a language—one that communicates to each of us at a level beneath our conscious awareness, one that reaches into the uncharted mechanisms of the human unconscious…That is a language that today has actually produced the profit basis for North American mass communications media.”

An entertaining aspect of Key’s anti-subliminal tirade is its non-stop focus on sexual appeals, overt and covert, in advertising. In a chapter titled “Sex is Alive and Embedded in Practically Everything,” Key says that “SEX is the most frequently embedded word in the American advertising industry.” He claims the one-word cue for lust is hidden in everything from liquor ads to Ritz crackers, the holes of which he says are arranged during baking to form several depictions of the letters S, E, and X. “Words such as fuck, cunt, ass, whore, prick, and death are also used frequently as subliminal triggers to motivate purchasing behaviors,” Key adds.

In his 1980 book The Clam-Plate Orgy, Key announced more subliminal sex findings. The book’s title, if you can believe it, refers to a pile of deep-fried clams pictured on a Howard Johnson’s placemat. Instead of an innocent plate of seafood, Key saw blatant suggestions of group sex and bestiality—little people and animals writhing around in ecstasy. In addition, Key argued, the ad copy with the picture was sexually suggestive: “a batch of succulent tender clams”; “Piled high with creamy coleslaw and french fries”; and “They always come…out crispy and crunchy.”

Like his allegations regarding the clam-plate picture, many of Key’s supposed subliminals seem less than conclusive. In Subliminal Seduction he writes: “Consider a cigarette ad that was designed to appeal to the woman readers of Cosmopolitan…Kent is a strong masculine name, suggesting a solid and distinguished WASP heritage. Simply change the vowel from E to U, however, and Kent becomes the phonetic word symbol for the female genital. Keep this n mind as we review Kent ads directed at both male and female smokers.” Walter Weir, a critic of Key’s analysis, retorted in Advertising Age: “Keep in mind also that Kent cigarettes were named after Herbert Kent, president of Lorillard at the time the cigarettes were introduced.”

Key’s analysis may not be persuasive, but it can jog one’s thinking on the subject if subliminal issue. Perhaps the main lesson to be learned from Subliminal Seduction and Key’s other books is that if you look hard enough, you can see some arguably suspicious things in all sorts of unlikely places. Anyone who has ever looked for images in the clouds knows the technique. While readers might not become convinced, as Key is, that “embedded words and picture illusions are part of most advertising throughout North America today,” they will get an idea of how scary the world looks for those convinced of the persuasive presence and power of subliminal ads.

If nothing else, Key’s unique assertions—for instance: “Bestiality may be illegal throughout most of the world, but, at the symbolic level, it appears to have sold a lot of Sprite”—have added a hysterically funny ingredient to the heated debate over the danger of subliminals.

Subliminal Suicide?
As with the first subliminal scare, the concerns inflamed by Key brought a response from Washington. The same year Subliminal Seduction hit the shelves of bookstores across the country, the FCC received complaints that a television station was using subliminal messages, which had not been reported since the 1950s.

In early 1974, the FCC issued a public notice stating their official position on subliminals: “We believe that the use of subliminal perception is inconsistent with the obligations of a [broadcast] licensee, and therefore we take this occasion to make clear that broadcasts employing such techniques are contrary to the public interest. Whether effective of not, such broadcasts clearly are intended to be deceptive.” (Three years later, the FCC issued another of its rare statements on subliminals, an 8-page “information bulletin” on subliminal projection.)

A decade later, the issue was still a cause for concern in Congress. In the year 1984, a subcommittee of the House Committee on Science and Technology addressed the state of subliminal communication technology. Chairman Dan Glickman opened the hearing by stating that the subcommittee had “made it a theme this year to explore in addition to the other areas of our jurisdiction those things which concern the public in a kind of Orwellian sense as a result of the nomenclature of this year 1984.”

Among the guests who testified was FCC official John Kamp, who updated the subcommittee on the history of government policy toward subliminal communication. According to Kamp, the FCC was still receiving complaints about subthreshold messages, “perhaps one a month or so,” but the “complaint level is now so low as to be only a permanent trace at the agency reflecting, as far as we can tell, more public fascination with this issue and concern over the undesirable manipulation possibilities of the technique than evidence of actual use.” Kamp reported that the FCC had not recently “received a complaint that on its face was sufficient for us to warrant a major investigation.”

Representative Glickman told Kamp to stay alert for subliminals. “I would just encourage you to keep a watch fully on this. I think with technology, the ability to modify tape in ways that we never dreamed of before, both video tape as well as audio tape, I think the kind of things that may not have occurred in the past could occur in the future.”

The Congress and the FCC aren’t the only sectors of government that have been drawn into the subliminal scares. A controversial Nevada court case highlighted the judicial dilemmas that can arise during periods of subliminal hysteria.

The families of two boys who committed suicide in 1985 sued Judas Priest, the bad boys of British heavy metal, for allegedly placing in a song a subliminal message—“Do it”—that the plaintiffs believed pushed their sons into suicide. The two-word trigger was purportedly buried in the song “Better By You, Better Than Me,” from the band’s 1978 album “Stained Class.” The plaintiffs sought $6.2 million dollars for the band’s “product liability.”

Absurd as the lawsuit may sound, the case, which was tried in 1989 and 1990, resulted in some landmark decisions about the legal standing of subliminal communication. Among the unusual matters that justice Jerry Carr Whitehead was forced to rule on was this perplexing question: are subliminal messages afforded the First Amendment protection of free speech? In a pre-trail motion, Judge Whitehead declared that subliminals are not protected speech, due to the fact that hidden messages do not impart information as do statements that are actually heard. Whitehead further said that subliminal messages are an invasion of privacy. With this issue decided, the trial began.

A number of experts on subliminal stimuli spoke at the trial, on behalf of both the parents and Judas Priest. The man who sounded the subliminal alert in the 1970s, Wilson Bryan Key, supported the plaintiff’s view in the pre-trial testimony, as did the more academic-minded researcher Howard Shevrin. Timothy E. Moore, a scientific skeptic of subliminals, weighed in on the other side. In a fascinating review of the case in Skeptical Inquirer magazine, Moore later summarized the views he shared with the court: “It was my opinion that there was no scientific support for the proposition that subliminal directives could influence behaviors of any kind, let along suicide.”

Judas Priest’s lawyers argued that in the first place, the band had placed no subliminal content on their album. (An examination of the original 24-track recording turned up no subliminals on any one track—so if a submerged sound resembling “Do it” was indeed present, it was likely an unintended blend of sounds from separate tracks.) Secondly, the defense argued, even if a subliminals were present, the power of such messages to move people to action has never been proven.

After an exhaustive review of the subliminal issue and many close listens of the song in question, Judge Whitehead reached the same conclusion. In his final ruling, in favor of Judas Priest, Whitehead stated his conclusions on the subliminal threat. “The scientific research presented does not establish that subliminal stimuli, even if perceived, may precipitate conduct of this magnitude,” he said.

“The strongest evidence presented at the trial showed no behavioral effects other than anxiety, distress or tension.”

Judge Whitehead also pointed out that “there exists other factors which explain the conduct of the deceased independent of subliminal stimuli.” Judas Priest lead singer Rob Halford, who like the rest of the band attended every session of the two-week trial, said later that those who blame suicides on a rock song overlook the genuine causes of the tragedy: “These two young men lost their lives because of their tragic involvement in drugs and alcohol and dysfunctional family units in which they weren’t given proper care, attention or guidance. I’m not making light of a tragic situation, but this trial was just an attempt to shift the burden of guilt to someone else’s shoulders.”

Though the victims led anguished lives, said Halford, “we gave them a great deal of pleasure with our music.” When his band won the trial in August of 1990, Halford said “it’s a great day for Judas Priest—more importantly, a great day for artists all over America.” Though bitter about the court experience, Halford said “it was important that we were there to stand up for ourselves and for our music and, to some extent, for the values of the American Constitution, which is rather ironic considering it was four Englishmen.”

Subliminal Survives
Today the power of subliminals to motivate viewers and listeners remains unproven. As psychologist James V. McConnell puts it, “secret attempts to manipulate people’s minds have yielded results as subliminal as the stimuli used.” But fears of subliminals have survived, as popular notions of subliminals are still influenced by the imaginative writings of Key and the anecdotal and varied rumors based loosely on the experiments of 1950s researcher James Vicary.

Like Wilson Key’s embeds and Judas Priest’s supposed suicide call, if you look and listen hard enough you just might find something resembling a subliminal message—though rarely are such hidden messages established as intentional. Many accusations of subliminal manipulation are just as hokey as they sound. Sometimes groups who are particularly alarmed about subliminals see them in the most unlikely of places.

Take the Virginia-based anti-abortion group American Life League (ALL), for example. In recent years ALL has vociferously protested what it says are veiled, naughty messages in animated films by the Walt Disney Company. In The Little Mermaid, ALL saw a suspect bulge on a character that appeared, out of its context, to be an erection. In The Lion King, ALL announced the presence of a wispy S-E-X spelled out in the clouds in one scene. And in Aladdin, when a character said “Scat good tiger, take off and go,” ALL heard “Good teenagers, take off your clothes.”

The latest spates of subliminal spottings took place against a backdrop of persistent public concern over subliminal manipulation. A decade after Wilson Key’s first book on subliminal advertising, awareness of the existence of the technique had spread significantly, according to a 1980s study. As describes in the Journal of Advertising, the study found that at least some knowledge of subliminals was claimed by 78 percent of those surveyed. Of those who had heard of subliminals, about 50 percent believed the technique was used in ads “always” or “often,” and 23 percent thought subliminals are used “sometimes.”

The authors of the study concluded that beliefs in subliminal manipulation are alive and well. “Respondents believe that subliminal advertising is widely and frequently used and that it is successful in selling products,” they said. “They also tend to believe it is an unacceptable, unethical and harmful advertising technique.”

Though subliminals still scare many, they are sometimes marketed as a desirable means of contacting and tinkering with the subconscious. Subliminal audio tapes on everything from losing weight to quitting smoking have become a popular self-help fad.

The subliminal strategy has entered the computer age. An Arizona company recently introduced software called “InnerTalk” that briefly flashes the user’s choice of 9,000 subliminal messages to the monitor, regardless of the program running. According to the company: “Messages such as ‘I am energy,’ ‘Money is good’ and ‘I am unafraid’ are flashed every fifteenth of a second, providing a constant flow of positive affirmation.” No one can affirm that InnerTalk will change behaviors or even attitudes, but for $49.95, computer users can now bombard their brains with hidden messages.

Another piece of subliminal software was marketed recently. Time Warner sold a computer called “Endorfun” that contains unnoticeably brief messages such as “You create joyous thought” and “In my own way I am a genius.” The slogan for the game? “Play more. Feel better.”

While such products either make light of or praise the power of subliminal persuasion, at least one researcher sees more alarming potential for the technique. In the summer 1989 issue of the Journal of the Mind and Behavior, Robert Bornstein presented a detailed and lengthy analysis of “Subliminal Techniques as Propaganda Tools.” He concluded that some subliminal methods might successfully deliver propaganda messages, although most likely any influence would be weak at best. Because subliminals bypass awareness, they may be particularly effective—as “the undetectability of subliminal stimuli may diminish their resistibility relative to other persuasion techniques.”

With the widespread use of digital television on the close horizon, it won’t be long before the technology is in place in most homes to insert subliminal messages as never before. Will the tactic be used? Will millions at last be manipulated by subliminals? And, as they have done periodically over the last four decades, will Americans react to the appearance of a new technology by spiraling into a subliminal scare?

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