Swift Viewing: The Popular Life of
Subliminal Influence
Charles R. Acland
Duke 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