In pursuit of its mission to expose cultural engineering in the entertainment industry, the Decoding Culture Foundation conducts several research, analysis, and data processing operations. To use the metaphor of a factory, what we do is gather the raw materials of data, process that data by organizing it in ways that are useful to researchers, and then refine it into analysis. The analysis, in turn, helps us further refine the analytical tools we use to study cultural engineering in the entertainment industry.
Research Operation #1: Records
We conduct records requests through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), gathering information from the federal government pertaining to the relationship between government agencies and public officials, on the one hand, and the entertainment industry, on the other. We are seeking information about the connections to government among individuals, companies, and specific projects (like movies) that are part of the entertainment industry. We also seek records from state and municipal governments and from historical archives when those records are relevant to an active research project.
Besides conducting our own records requests, we compile records obtained by other researchers and make them publicly available along with our own.
If you would like to volunteer to help with FOIA requests or other records searches, or if you have documents you believe would be of interest to us, click here or see our Contact Us page to get in touch.
Research Operation #2: Oral History
We conduct interviews with people who have direct knowledge of the entertainment industry. Oral history is an especially valuable tool for our purposes, because there are limits to how much one can learn about Hollywood, the music industry, and other sectors of the entertainment industry through documentary evidence alone. It is a notoriously insulated world, and while official histories and authorized biographies are useful, these sources are often unreliable and contain gaps. Among the chief functions of oral history is to fill in such gaps and to challenge accepted narratives. By interviewing people with an insider view of this world, we are seeking to understand the dynamics by which cultural engineering agendas are actually implemented—how, for example, the sexual revolution was so enthusiastically promoted by New Hollywood.
If you’ve worked in the entertainment industry or otherwise have personal knowledge that you think might be of interest to us, please contact the Director of Research Operations at brettcarollo@decoding-culture.com or fill out this form.
Research Operation #3: Secondary Sources
We collect secondary sources—books, articles, etc.—pertaining to cultural engineering in the entertainment industry. When we can, we post these sources on our site or provide links to them.
Otherwise, they are compiled into bibliographies, which we are continually annotating. If you know of any sources not listed in the bibliographies that pertain to cultural engineering in the entertainment industry, you may contact the Director of Research Operations at brettcarollo@decoding-culture.com.
Data Processing Operations
Our data processing operations revolve around the building and maintenance of databases as a common resource for other researchers. There are three basic types of databases on the site:
I. Using available records and other sources, we compile data on the relationships between members of the entertainment industry, on the one hand, and powerful individuals and organizations, including the US Federal Government, on the other. Our goal is to make it easy for a researcher to find out, for example, if a particular actor or director ever worked for the United States Information Agency.
II. We are interested as well in tracking the presence of certain subjects, themes, and tropes relevant to cultural engineering agendas (for example, the portrayal of intelligence agencies or the depiction of hypothetical mass media mind control). Our goal, again, is to organize this sort of information into easily navigable databases.
III. We also track the use of cinematic techniques—both narrative and audio-visual—that make audiences more suggestible or otherwise affect viewers in ways that make them more susceptible to cultural engineering. For example, there is evidence that sounds outside the audible spectrum affect brain state,[1] and some Hollywood films, like Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Apocalypse, incorporate recorded sounds outside the audible spectrum. Also, subliminal and pseudo-subliminal sounds and images have been used in films like The Exorcist.
If you have any information pertinent to our existing databases, you may contact the Director of Research Operations. We are also actively soliciting information here as to certain subjects, themes, tropes, and techniques involved in Hollywood cultural engineering.
Analysis
The fruit of our research and data processing operations—the final product, so to speak—is the analysis that we and other Foundation contributors perform. If the main purpose of our research operations is to expose relationships between the entertainment industry and powerful sectors of society that have an interest in shaping culture, then the purpose of our analysis is to reveal the nature of those relationships and the cultural engineering agendas underlying many of them.
Much of this analysis is found in the pages of Cultural Engineering Studies, the Foundation’s official magazine, which is dedicated to our mission of exposing hidden agendas within the entertainment industry and the methods by which these agendas are carried out. The magazine will feature articles by a range of scholars, journalists, and independent researchers. If you would like to be a contributor, contact the editor-in-chief at brettcarollo@decoding-culture.com.
We also present our analysis, along with the methodological and historiographical concepts underlying it, in the form of education initiatives, spearheaded by Professor John Stroup, who taught for seven years at Yale (where he also earned his PhD) and thirty-four years at Rice University. Professor Stroup provides background on how modernity seen from a history of concepts perspective turns out to have been fated to require and produce more and more effective tools and scenarios for cultural engineering. Topics include history as a forward-moving, unitary process; crisis as a kind of ever-intensifying storm; superheroes and super spies; and conspiracy theories real and imagined.
[1] Oohashi, Tsutomo, et al, “Inaudible High-Frequency Sounds Affect Brain Activity: Hypersonic Effect,” Journal of Neurophysiology 86, no. 3 (2000): 3548–58; Fukushima, Ariko, “Frequencies of Inaudible High-Frequency Sounds Differentially Affect Brain Activity: Positive and Negative Hypersonic Effects,” PLoS ONE 9, no. 4:e95464. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0095464