On what axis was it polarizing.. it was maybe a social media for the well-connected, so.. elitist vs populist?

I've come to appreciate Sixto over Bob Dylan, because he reminds me of some vital "(in)efficacies" that I can see(?) in the participants here :)

Lagniappe (Joan's dad): https://pubs.aip.org/aapt/ajp/article-abstract/28/3/254/1036...

Oops, I was a decade off in my primary referent: 1930s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Goebbels#:~:text=Goebbe...

but sounds like 1920s may be fine overall?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_public_relations#:~...

(at least Bernays, whatever he may have advocated about undermining source attribution, did not seem to advocate actual sock puppets?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays#Third_parties

>sock puppets

Those might soon become the drones of social (elite v "elite" culture) wars!

(Also occurred to me that Monotheism has been unreasonably effective against an other kind of sock puppetry. Hierophants. Had to get inventive :)

I asked Gemini to argue that Bernays was a populist (i.e. against the usual diagnosis):

He who seeks to manipulate public opinion must always heed it. (1923)

Started soft? Becoming more of a hard-line elitist later?

TIL the Daily Mirror used to be a feminist organ

An "always heed it" line is the closing sentence of:

"MANIPULATING PUBLIC OPINION: THE WHY AND THE HOW"

https://ia800201.us.archive.org/1/items/AmericanJournalOfSoc...

which seems overall to argue less that one should respect public opinion in itself, than that, in order to move the public from A to B, one must have not just B in mind, but also A, in order to connive an appropriate vector along AB.

EDIT: atm I'm not finding that sentence in 1923's "Crystallizing Public Opinion" https://www.gutenberg.org/files/61364/61364-h/61364-h.htm

from Bernays' 1928 book: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.275553/page/n1...

> The radio is at present one of the most important tools of the propagandist.

What you couldn't do with radio is to triangulate targets via associated clusters; they used snail mail to do that.