Battle flag  Americans' experiences inform the symbol's potent
meaning  For many years, students in speech and mass
communications classes learned about "the bullet theory of
communication" (later renamed "the hypodermic needle theory").
The idea was that the message was contained entirely in a tidy
packet that lodged in the recipient, changing perception and
influencing behavior in ways that were beyond that person's
power to resist, and affecting every recipient in exactly the
same way.  The theory was easy to disprove simply because
recipients do not react uniformly. Instead, the information
delivered to them interacts with information they already
possess.  For example, news of a shooting in a Connecticut
school horrifies everyone, but it affects the parent of a child
in that school differently than it affects a childless person in
Colorado. The difference is not a flaw in the message, nor is it
the "fault" of the diverse recipients. It's just the way
communication works.  Flags are powerful symbols, cult