Choose your own adventure: propaganda, games, and the quest for a more "democratic" media environment.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties - Book review

The Democratic Surround: Multimedia & American Liberalism from World Warn to the Psychedelic Sixties, by Fred Turner, University of Chicago Press, 365 pages, $32.50

How much autonomy does a video game player have? Unlike a viewer watching a movie or TV show, the gamer makes decisions with consequences for the unfolding story. He controls a character, and he determines how that figure moves through a virtual space. And yet he does this all within the parameters set out by the game's designers, which constrain his choices and often guide him, with a heavy or a light hand, to predetermined outcomes. There are new freedoms here, but there are new forms of manipulation too, and they interact in complicated, ever-shifting ways.

Seven decades ago, as the U.S. fought World War II, a group of social scientists pondered similar questions about earlier forms of media. The Democratic Surround, a smart and fascinating new history by the Stanford historian Fred Turner, excavates their efforts and traces their influence through the next several decades. In the process, Turner finds unexpected links between undertakings as different as Cold War propaganda campaigns and the Human Be-In, one of the most famous hippie festivals of the '60s.

Turner's narrative actually begins before the war, as intellectuals tried to make sense of the rise of fascism. One popular explanation for Hitler's ascent held that the key factor was propaganda--and, beyond that, the Nazi propagandists' ability to bombard Germans via the media. This in turn opened up a wider set of fears, as those theorists fretted that mass media were producing a mass man. With their "top-down, one-to-many" structure, Turner explains, the broadcasting, publishing, and filmmaking industries seemed to be asking audiences "to practice the sort of unreasoning fealty to a single source of illumination demanded of citizens in totalitarian states."

In some ways this represented a fear of centralized elite control. But it also reflected an elitist fear of ordinary people, who were imagined as an easily mesmerized mob: feral robots ready to drop their individuality and submit to an alien force. In one infamous essay, the German-born Marxist Theodor Adorno identified popular music as a part of the problem. "Rhythmically obedient" jazz fans--the "radio generation"--were "susceptible to a process of masochistic adjustment to authoritarian collectivism," he wrote. Pop culture was perceived as an enemy.

The event that "brought Adorno's point home" for many Americans, Turner writes, was Orson Welles' 1938 broadcast of The War of the Worlds, a radio play that allegedly set off a nationwide panic as listeners mistook it for a real Martian invasion. By showing "how easy it is to start a mass delusion," the columnist Dorothy Thompson claimed afterward, "Mr. Orson...