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

From Library Journal
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.


From Booklist
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


Review
"Excellent, arresting . . . Gitlin covers vast reaches of terrain with exceptional skill and daring."



Review
Praise for Todd Gitlin:"A balanced yet biting critique . . . Gitlin is a savvy guide to our increasingly kinetic times." -San Francisco Chronicle "Admirable . . . Gitlin shares a theologian's sense of the profound, a judge's eye for equity, and an activist's hankering for the microphone." -Newsday"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


Book Description
Everyone knows that the media surround us, but no one quite understands what this means for our lives. In Media Unlimited, a remarkable and original look at our media-glutted, speed-addicted world, Todd Gitlin makes us stare, as if for the first time, at the biggest picture of all. From video games to elevator music, action movies to reality shows, Gitlin evokes a world of relentless sensation, instant transition, and nonstop stimulus. He shows how all media, all the time fuels celebrity worship, paranoia, and irony; and how attempts to ward off the onrush become occasions for yet more media. Far from signaling a "new information age," the media torrent, as Gitlin argues, encourages disposable emotions and casual commitments, and threatens to make democracy a sideshow.

Both a startling analysis and a charged polemic, Media Unlimited reveals the unending stream of manufactured images and sounds as a defining feature of our civilization and a perverse culmination of Western hopes for freedom.



About the Author
Todd Gitlin is a professor at New York University and the author of eight previous notable books, including Inside Prime Time, The Sixties, and The Twilight of Common Dreams. He lives in New York City.



Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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.



Buy from Amazon     Compare Prices

Everyone knows that the media surround us, but no one quite understands what this means for our lives. In Media Unlimited, a remarkable and original look at our media-glutted, speed-addicted world, Todd Gitlin makes us stare, as if for the first time, at the biggest picture of all. From video games to elevator music, action movies to reality shows, Gitlin evokes a world of relentless sensation, instant transition, and nonstop stimulus. He shows how all media, all the time fuels celebrity worship, paranoia, and irony; and how attempts to ward off the onrush become occasions for yet more media. Far from signaling a "new information age," the media torrent, as Gitlin argues, encourages disposable emotions and casual commitments, and threatens to make democracy a sideshow.

Both a startling analysis and a charged polemic, Media Unlimited reveals the unending stream of manufactured images and sounds as a defining feature of our civilization and a perverse culmination of Western hopes for freedom.


Buy from Barnes & Noble     Compare Prices