Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives

Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives

A provocative new exploration of our media-saturated lives-a worthy successor to Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media. Everyone knows that the media is all around us, but no one quite understands its effect on our lives. Critics and analysts focus on this show or that celebrity, but they miss the true import of our total immersion in a fast-moving sea of sounds and images. As he did with television in Inside Prime Time and with the culture wars in The Twilight of Common Dreams , Todd Gitlin once again recasts the world we think we know. In Media Unlimited , a remarkable and original look at our media-saturated, speed-addicted world, he makes us stare, as if for the first time, at the biggest picture of all. Ranging from video games to elevator music, action movies to reality shows, punditry to Internet exhibitionists, Gitlin evokes a world of relentless sensation and nonstop stimulus. Far from signaling a "new information age" or a rescue from passivity, the media torrent, as he shows, fosters disposable emotions and casual commitments, and threatens to make democracy a sideshow. A charged polemic, Media Unlimited reveals the glut of manufactured images and sounds as one of the defining features of our civilization, and as a perverse culmination of Western hopes for freedom. From Inside Prime Time to too much media: NYU professor Gitlin argues that the Information Age has us marooned emotionally and may threaten democracy. Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. Gitlin, a professor of journalism and culture, examines why and how it has come about that so much of our time is spent being bombarded by communications, information, and entertainment from a variety of media. Gitlin wants to avoid the typical analysis of the effects of the media on society and, instead, looks at the media as an experience in itself, with no definitive meaning necessarily attached, analyzing the feelings elicited by a stream of information. He concedes that his objective is a gamble, but it pays off. Citing observations by Marx, de Tocqueville, Orwell, and a stream of others, Gitlin offers a short, dizzying history of how we got to the point where we are supersaturated with a torrent of information coming at us at incredible speed. The author explores how we manage and have even begun to resist media saturation, as we step back, take a breath, and consider "what we want to do about it besides change channels." Readers interested in contemporary media and culture will enjoy this absorbing book. Vanessa Bush Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Praise for Todd Gitlin: "Candid, courageous, and eloquent....Strong stuff, badly in need of saying."-Tamar Jacoby, The New York Times Book Review on The Twilight of Common Dreams "Admirable....Tells more of the truth about its complex, quintessentially American subject than any book I know."-Susan Sontag on The Sixties "Perhaps the best book ever written about the thinking of the insulated men and women in the executive suites of Century City, Burbank, and Television City."- Los Angeles Times on Inside Prime Time Todd Gitlin is a professor of culture, journalism, and sociology at New York University and the author of eight previous notable books, including Inside Prime Time, The Whole World is Watching, The Sixties, and The Twilight of Common Dreams. His commentaries on media and politics appear frequently in the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, New York Times, Dissent, and Salon, as well as on National Public Radio. He lives in New York City. For all the talk, and the talk about the talk, the big story about the media slips through our fingers. The huge, obvious but weird and hard-to-grasp reality is that living with the media is today one of the main things human beings do. The most important truth about the communications we live among is not that they deceive (which they do); or that they broadcast a limiting ideology (which they do); or emphasize sex and violence (which they do); or convey diminished images of the good, the true, and the normal (which they do); or corrode the quality of art (which they also do); or reduce language (which they surely do), but that with all their lies, skews, and shallow pleasures, they surround and seep into our way of life with a promise of feeling-always there, speeding forward, flashing out of large screens and small, gushing forth in living rooms, or sliding back into the background of life, but always beckoning, always coursing onward.