Your Thoughts Are Not Your Own Volume Two: Marketing, Movies and Music

by Neil Sanders

The opening chapter in Lippmann’s Public Opinion is titled The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads. In this he explained that the ‘pictures’ in people’s minds, the way they ‘see’ things and their assumptions of what is ‘real’ is their method to interpret roles and positions in the world. Peoples understanding of the world through these conceptualised pictures denotes how people conduct themselves in everyday situations. “… The object of study of the public opinion social analyst is reality as defined by internal perception or images of that reality. Public opinion deals with indirect, unseen and puzzling facts, and there is nothing obvious about them. The situations to which the public opinions refer are known as opinions…The pictures inside the heads of these human beings, the pictures of themselves, of others, of their needs, purposes and relationship, are their public opinions. Those pictures which are acted upon by groups of people, or by individuals acting in the name of groups, are Public Opinion with capital letters. The Picture inside so often misleads men in their dealings with the world outside.”