The Power of “Language”

Chapter 1

RSA ANIMATION

Group members: Jason, Natasha, Peter and Shella

RSA: Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts.

There are so many ideas in the world being shared, and RSA,world’s no.1 non-profit channel, is organi-sation helping everyone to communicate their ideas through hand-drawn animation or visuals, with ex-planations.

Inspired by RSA animation, we have created a hand-drawn animation video based on the question “How can language help one acquire power?”

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How does “language” help one acquire power?

Behind the scenes

The first thing that we did was not choosing the ques-tion, but choosing the article. We chose articles that we think were interesting, then we assigned articles among the group members and share what the article is about after that. During the discussion, we also chose the ques-tion that we thought was related to all three articles. We began answering the given question by referring to the article one at a time.

The first article was talking about how language can help peo-ple make better decisions. We answer the question by typing it as a text, then we think about the pictures that would be able to show our thoughts clearly.

One of the highlights of this video is the part when we ex-plained about propaganda techniques, I believe that it is the one of the easiest part to understand out of the animation. Us-ing big names, like Hitler and Mao, helped us to share our points. Also, we have successfully show that name-calling, a technique of propaganda, help to show superiority.

The question we chose to answer for the RSA animation video is “how does language help one acquire power?” This question was answered with the help of three arti-cles. First from BBC News: Britishism and the Britishisa-tion of American English. Second from Huffington post: Thinking in a Foreign Language leads to better decisions and the last one was about propaganda techniques.

Copy and paste this link into your browser to watch it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMK2jmitKBg&feature=results_video

Chapter 2

PROPAGANDA

Definition: Information used to manipulate viewers to thinking that the information given is right.

Group members: Jason, Natasha, Christabel and Shella

The "Green Tea" group has published 3 samples of propaganda; the first a slogan, second a banner, and third a slide-out cardboard. We have used 6 different techniques, two for each piece. The following explains what techniques we have used and how we have ap-plied it to our work:

Inspired by:

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Technique: Fear and Ad NauseamYOU CAN’ T

DO IT!

Propaganda Example 1

The poster with the saying "You can't do it!" if read over again will unconsciously cause readers to start to believe it's true. In addition, it is printed in combina-tion with an eye-catching and unusual beautiful but muscular woman, automatically attracting the eyes of many. This propaganda is inspired by the original war-time "We Can Do It!" poster intended to encourage workers to maintain war production. However, instead of encouraging viewers, we have flipped the meaning around and changed the purpose to cause fear in one's mind, letting them believe that they can not be as good and all-rounded as us, class of 2014. I do think that this poster is a successful one because it relates to every-one in the school, an IB student would know that being all-rounded is important.

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Propaganda Example 2

Prejudice and dictate - The use of emotional and prejudiced vocabulary in the slogan attaches moral goodness to the speaker, and downgrades the reader. It is biased and misleading, and does not give the reader the position to argue. It informs them that they are just simply not as good and will never be as good. This propaganda, again, does not offer any other choice; simply saying they are stuck in the position they are in now.

We first created some quotes like “we do not use the word mistake often, but in your case...” , “we have evolved, you are the missing link between apes and human” and of course the one we finally used for the poster. We chose “your best work is my worst” because it relates to school more than the other quotes. Personally, the other quotes refer to life in general, so we thought this quote is the best to show that class 2014 is the best grade in Si-narmas World Academy.

I do think this is a successful example of propaganda because it is straightforward and it shows how class 2014 is ahead compared to the other grades. This poster can also be used to encourage the other grades in Sinarmas to work harder to be the best.

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Technique: Beautiful People and glittering generalities

The slide-out cardboard gives the impression that the class of 2014 are filled with intelligent people whom clearly has a bright future ahead of them. This makes the viewers believe that they will not be as successful in the future as the graduation class of 2014 because they're just not as good. It makes the viewers feel that if they want to be successful and be accepted into prestig-ious universities, they must also be a part of the speaker. There are no offensive words included in this propa-ganda, only emotionally appealing words presented upon the class of 2014.

In this slide-out cardboard we used a character that is popular to young people, therefore it would instantly catching the eyes of students in the school.

Propaganda Example 3

There are different kinds of language, language can mean the common thing that is used by people of a certain country to talk among themselves or it can be the manner or style of speech, formal or information. Language is the most power-ful tool for communication; however, it is also the barrier for people in different countries to get to know each other. As I have heard many from the older generation says, “ I should have learned that language, it could have helped me with my job”. Just by saying that very sentence, they have shown their appreciation to the language that they do not speak or even understand. Sometimes people appreciate a language they do not speak so much that they would rather be born from a cer-tain country. Every language shows power in different ways, some more than others. I am sure, most people in the world appreciate the power of English language, as it is one of the most universal language, though people from the rural places do not speak English. English language has given everyone the power of communicating with people outside your coun-try.

Let’s take Korean language as an example, since the rise of K-pop, people started to listen to Korean music without knowing that the songs exactly mean. The power of Korean language is now getting stronger and because of the fact more and more songs are released by the K-pop singers, peo-ple are encouraged to learn a new language, Korean.

Another example that can be taken is when one hears the emotion in another language. Say a motivational speaker is speaking passionately in French, or a lady on the street is cry-ing for help in African, I am sure that you would be touched in some way. From this kind of situation, I am sure that you can appreciate French or African than you did before.

I personally think that every language should be appreciated whether we can speak it or not and the reason is because peo-ple from the other side of the Earth might be using that very language to help them communicate their thoughts and ideas.

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CHAPTER 3

“Can we appreciate language without speaking the language?”

Chapter 4

MY WORLD

Language lives around and in us. Without language, one simply can not do anything big. Without language people would live alone, not being able to share com-municate. Without language, the world just could not be a place like it is now. Without language, the world would never make progress because no one is sharing their ideas and thoughts.

The power of communication is the best thing you can ever have. Being able to communicate to other people using more than one language is definitely an advantage, especially in a school that has international students. When I have problems with school work and needed help from a friend to help me with it, we would most probably discuss it in English lan-guage. But it might not work out every time, knowing an-other language, like Bahasa Indonesia, makes it more conven-ient for us to communicate our points.

Though I do not really have a big experience about the use of language to gain power, but I was affected by a few. An ex-ample of the effect of language on me was when we had to choose the school student council. Though I was not the in-volved in the student council, I had the opportunity to see the campaign posters and listen to speeches before the election day. Different candidates used different speech techniques to grab the attention of voters. One grabbed my attention more than others, she used the propaganda techniques, which was Ad Haminem, which means attacking opponent in order for people to get her point across to the audience, that made her

speech sounded confident and powerful, she sounded like she knew exactly what she was doing. Her speech almost got me to vote for her, however, pointing other people’s mistake was not I was looking for, I wanted to vote for someone whom I am sure, could do something big for the school, just by listen-ing to the speeches.

Going through that made me realise that the use of language can affect people’s decision or mind. I am sure people around the world might have gone through the same experience maybe with the United States Presidential Election.

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CHAPTER 4

How has language affected me?

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Works Cited