Swift Viewing: The Popular Life of Subliminal InfluenceCharles R.AclandDuke University Press, 2011

Scholars have debated the idea that hidden messages might influence behavior on a large scale and generally concluded that subliminal advertisements fail to produce the results suggested by their proponents. Regardless, since the 1950s, popular audiences have both fueled and feared the possibility that such messages might have an effect on consumers and social behavior. Charles R. Acland's Swift Viewing reveals how the concept of subliminal advertising evolved from a set of psychological experiments to a widespread belief that media could indeed manipulate viewers with imperceptible messages. Acland's narrative describes the tracks of academic and popular—the latter he describes as “vernacular”—understandings that have emerged from subliminal messaging strategies, beginning with forms of nineteenth-century hypnotism, to dubious claims made by marketers in the 1950s, and eventually to leading stories of contemporary news. Acland's history delves deeply into concerns about subliminal messages, showing how the notion of “hidden persuaders” became part of the vernacular media critique, as well as how this widespread social interpretation reflected anxiety about a media environment that had become overwhelming. He presents a rich archive of examples, many of them fascinating and even mesmerizing, which include educational technologies used in American classrooms, literary devices in science fiction, and sensational (“huckster”) claims in the late 1950s. Woven together with theories about the role of media popularized by Marshall McLuhan, Acland advances the notion that subliminal messages provided, at the very least, a reflection of the social sense of information overload throughout the second half the twentieth century. In Acland's narrative, the infamous Orson Welles “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast in 1938 marked the first major event in the development of contemporary notions about the way media might influence society on subliminal levels. Based on the national hysteria that followed Welles's staged interplanetary invasion, scholars recognized that popular audiences might react en masse to media in ways the producers of messages had not previously understood. Both research on the phenomenon and popular reaction to it were fueled by the experiments of James Vicary, who, in the late 1950s, announced the results of a demonstration involving more than 14,000 patrons of a New Jersey movie theater. Vicary had arranged to have the words “drink Coca Cola” and “eat popcorn” flashed on the movie screen for fractions of a second at intervals throughout the projection of a feature film. The results, he claimed, included a rise in sales of Coke and popcorn. However, Vicary failed in attempts to duplicate the results from his New Jersey movie theater experiment and later admitted that his findings had embellished data. Moreover, popular resentment over the use of subliminal messages as manipulative marketing contributed to banishing it as an accepted form of communication. Regardless, subliminal messaging has recurrently appeared in both scholarly and popular discussions. A notable example: the 2000 election, which was at least temporarily diverted by allegations that ads on behalf of Republican candidate George W. Bush had subliminally referenced the word “rats” as a subtext for “Democrats.” The other samples Acland offers of subliminal messaging during its heyday in the late 1950s, as well as its continued (but marginalized) uses since then, are a mix of fun and weird. His style combines a rich historiography with popular and obscure symbols to create an informative and entertaining read. Acland, a communication studies professor at Concordia University in Montreal, is the author of Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes, and Global Culture (2003) and co-editor of Useful Cinema (2011), both of which are also published by Duke University Press.

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