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

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Summary: Media Meditations
Review: Todd Gitlin's latest offers a balanced dialectical view of TV and its dangers, real and imagined. This is one of several books that offer a needed corrective to Bernard Goldberg's superficial analysis of the so-called liberal media, Bias. For example, the Gulf War coverage was highly inaccurate in its claim of (4% of the bombs used on Iraq being smart bombs or highly effective Patriot missiles. Of course, such reporting does the bidding of Bush I's war agenda. This is not to say that there was no justification for stopping Saddam as Gitlin points out. There is a focus in the early part of the book on speed, accelerated living, and its effects. James Gleick's book Faster which came out a few years ago, has greater depth than Media Unlimited but lacks the breadth and far ranging sociological insight of Gitlin's book. As one comes to expect from Gitlin, there are many other fascinating observations. America has been particulary adept at utilizing formulas to mass produce culture. American culture has consequently become the lingua franca (an obsolete and ironic term) of world culture. IT also has the advantage of a market that is both massive and heterogenous, in another words, representative of the world in which cultural products will eventually be marketed. Tocqueville pointed out as early as the 1840s that America cultivated entertainment over elevation, fun not refinement. Gitlin also tells us that cable TV offered us diversity and thus the end of the shotgun approach to entertainment.Other points: critics rarely address the popular passion for the will not to know--the need for illusion. Goldberg et al pay attention: "When the evidence for a particular change is selective at best or largely anecdotal, , when we ignore awkward counter-evidence and leap too easily from a belief about bias to a belief about its effects, we are awkwardly trying (and failing) to come to grips with the media as a whole, and to register its protests." p.142

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Summary: Is original media criticism an oxymoron?
Review: While reading this book, I had the feeling that the author was making his observations from the perspective of an overgrown teenager, home from school around 3 pm and making puerile rants at the (...) tube, while downing a coke and potato chips. The author, who has said elsewhere that TV has become "our ground of being," borrowing Paul Tillich's phrase, doesn't seem to acknowledge or understand that most American adults work hard for a living and really don't invest a lot of mental effort in watching TV. They're actually busy with making dinner, dealing with their kids, paying the bills, downing a couple of cool ones, and getting up in the morning to do it over again. This is not to disparage the hard working American, but rather to suggest that most people really don't take TV all that seriously, or even pay it much attention. Just because the TV is on, doesn't mean people are watching it, or at least watching it critically. They have more basic needs to attend to. From 1980 to 2002, the time on the job (any job) has increased by about ten hours a week. I don't think information or pseudo information gets through to a culture that is so sleep-deprived. (...) Additionally, Gitlin takes his subject matter entirely too seriously. I mean understanding media was pretty much covered by McLuhan, and, just as A. Whitehead said that all philosophy was a footnote to Plato, one could say the same for McLuhan in relationship to his progenitors. Additionally, Gitlin's perspective's really couldn't be that profound since he seems to be called upon by the media as the academic in residence for news shows. I think it may be time for some producers to cull their rolodexes (or is that palm pilots?) I started this book, believing I would be at least somewhat intellectually challenged, but in the end, the sentences sort of just rolled over me like a syndicated drama series rerun.

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Summary: A Different Twist on Media
Review: You read a lot about sex and violence in media and how our society is threatened by our casual acceptance of skin and death. But you don't read too much about the shear volume and pervasiveness of media. You also don't read too much about how media delivers feelings. These feelings we get from media in a way can substitute the feelings we get from action in real life. I love the topic, but did not give five stars because the point of the book never seems to really take off.

Rating:
Summary: A Different Twist on Media
Review: You read a lot about sex and violence in media and how our society is threatened by our casual acceptance of skin and death. But you don't read too much about the shear volume and pervasiveness of media. You also don't read too much about how media delivers feelings. These feelings we get from media in a way can substitute the feelings we get from action in real life. I love the topic, but did not give five stars because the point of the book never seems to really take off.