Impact
During the Second World War, Mass Observation research was occasionally influential in shaping British public policy. In 1939 Mass Observation publicly critiqued the Ministry of Information's posters such as the Keep Calm and Carry On poster, which led to their being replaced with more appropriate posters. In addition, their study of saving habits were used by John Maynard Keynes successfully to argue for tax policy changes. During the war, there were also a few cases of Mass Observation (MO) doing research on commission for government authorities trying to shape recruiting and war propaganda: Mary Adams, for example, employed MO on commission for the Ministry of Information.
Read more about this topic: Mass Observation
Famous quotes containing the word impact:
“Television does not dominate or insist, as movies do. It is not sensational, but taken for granted. Insistence would destroy it, for its message is so dire that it relies on being the background drone that counters silence. For most of us, it is something turned on and off as we would the light. It is a service, not a luxury or a thing of choice.”
—David Thomson, U.S. film historian. America in the Dark: The Impact of Hollywood Films on American Culture, ch. 8, William Morrow (1977)
“Conquest is the missionary of valour, and the hard impact of military virtues beats meanness out of the world.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice—there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community. To discover how scientific revolutions are effected, we shall therefore have to examine not only the impact of nature and of logic, but also the techniques of persuasive argumentation effective within the quite special groups that constitute the community of scientists.”
—Thomas S. Kuhn (b. 1922)