fruit.

3. Publicity as a Form of Secondary Contact[130]

In contrast with the political machine, which has founded its organized
action on the local, personal, and immediate interests represented by
the different neighborhoods and localities, the good-government
organizations, the bureaus of municipal research, and the like have
sought to represent the interests of the city as a whole and have
appealed to a sentiment and opinion neither local nor personal. These
agencies have sought to secure efficiency and good government by the
education of the voter, that is to say, by investigating and publishing
the facts regarding the government.

In this way publicity has come to be a recognized form of social
control, and advertising--"social advertising"--has become a profession
with an elaborate technique supported by a body of special knowledge.

It is one of the characteristic phenomena of city life and of society
founded on secondary relationships that advertising should have come to
occupy so important a place in its economy.

In recent years every individual and organization which has had to deal
with the public, that is to say, the public outside the smaller and more
intimate communities of the village and small town, has come to have its
press agent, who is often less an advertising man than a diplomatic man
accredited to the newspapers, and through them to the world at large.
Institutions like the Russell Sage Foundation, and to a less extent the
General Education Board, have sought to influence public opinion
directly through the medium of publicity. The Carnegie Report upon
Medical Education, the Pittsburgh Survey, the Russell Sage Foundation
Report on Comparative Costs of Public-School Education in the Several
States, are something more than scientific reports. They are rather a
high form of journalism, dealing with existing conditions critically,
and seeking through the agency of publicity to bring about radical
reforms. The work of the Bureau of Municipal Research in New York has
had a similar practical purpose. To these must be added the work
accomplished by the child-welfare exhibits, by the social surveys
undertaken in different parts of the country, and by similar propaganda
in favor of public health.

As a source of social control public opinion becomes important in
societies founded on secondary relationships of which great cities are a
type. In the city every social group tends to create its own m