Most of the visual data that I selected was deliberate, from my collection of photos taken over the last several years for my Internet Radio web site, www.radiocasbah.com, and from the front page of my Facebook feed relating to musicians that I know and the ever-present promotional-propaganda on the Facebook side panel.  The only errant photo was the photo used from Subjectivity, Role, Access, Ethics.  The subject of that paper did not lend itself too readily to the photos that I have since none were ever taken as I interviewed the various musicians I interviewed since 2005.

The visual data was chosen because I am interested in small-group propaganda, and the small –group propaganda that occurs between local musicians and fans, as well as between fans, in live group settings as well as virtually through the Internet that illustrates this phenomenon rather easily.  While the photos make this idea obvious to me, further explanations, discussions, and definitions of various types of propaganda will be necessary because of the embedded and engrained cultural conditioning in the United States (that is also propaganda) towards the word propaganda itself and towards the idea that propaganda is something that is practiced by the opposition and those that one disagrees with rather than her-or himself.

If I decide to utilize interviews to qualitatively explore this idea for my thesis, other photos will have to be used.  Most of the photos I have used illustrate unintentional propaganda rather subtly, and the Facebook examples are a little more obvious. While this will be the bulk of my thesis, the photos that I will need to employ must be a little more “intentional” in nature to illustrate that the propaganda is obvious, though the person using it is not aware of it.  For this, interviews that I conduct and additional audio and visual samples from various media may be necessary to illustrate my points.