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

by Todd Gitlin

Book Overview

Both a startling analysis and a charged polemic, this revised edition of Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives reveals the unending stream of manufactured images... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0805048987
• ISBN13: 9780805048988
• Release Date: January 2001
• Publisher: Metropolitan Books
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.6" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Media Go! Go! Go?

I live on the side of an active volcano in Hawaii and once a week a shipment of books arrives, and I can't keep up with it all and usually skim most of the muck, but I kept diving word for word into T.G.'s (Todd Gitlin) book, and it introduced me to many new spins - though it usually runs the traditional media narrative, little reader's digest bite-sized media alliance and rebellion, you know the deal, but it works sometimes here, and I think it's worth checking out.

great media criticism

This book picks up where Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death" left off. "Media Unlimited" is media criticism of the best kind, which is to say that it is consistent with what one would expect from someone as intellectally talented as Gitlin. Gitlin lucidly analyzes the obvious yet invisible media torrent that dominates our daily existence. Gitlin's media critique is persuasive without being pushy,and moreover, it's deadly accurate and timely. This is the right book for the right time

Excellent Media Theory

Todd Gitlin has been on the forefront of media theory for a long time. As a professor at NYU, his classes are next to legendary. If anyone is set to step into the footsteps of marshall McLuhen, it is Todd Gitlin.Media Unlimited looks at the ubiquity of modern media in our lives. With a special focus on television and the Internet, Gitlin examines how we have become over-stimulate dto the point where we can no longer think or feel for ourselves...we merely act according to the audio and visual triggers that the media has given us.Media Unlimited is an excellent book with scholarly ideas but remains very readable. An valuable work all around.

Subtle, nuanced, complex vision of the media torrent

I bought Media Unlimited yesterday. And in line with its emphasis on speed, I read it in two sittings. It's impressive.It seems that Todd Gitlin once again has released a book written without bombast, without alarm. There are no sirens in it. There are no skies falling. The book presents a new way of thinking about our new way of living. If we aren't "Amusing Ourselves to Death," then we are only amusing ourselves to fleeting passions. And the costs are therefore subtle, hard to measure, and potentially debilitating in unexpected ways.Media Unlimited takes a reasoned, complex look at the phenomena of torrential media and presents it all in a fresh and lucid way. The book makes us consider the ways in which we swim among images and sounds, the ways we construct our desires and interests in response to what Gitlin argues is a major shift in the experience of being human after the 20th century.Gitlin's reading of media flows is -- dare I say -- hip. When he writes about hackers or Eminem, I don't get the feeling that he has only read about them in the Times. I appreciate that the book is respectful of fandom, aware of the value of passions (even fleeting, meta, hyper-mediated passions ... this morning I found myself nostalgically singing along with a song from my college days, ABC's "When Smokey Sings," an homage to Smokey Robinson, when the video came on VH1 Classic ... that's passion thrice removed), and willing to grant acknowledgement to potential progressive influence where it's due.I hope the book catches a wave. Gitlin was able to place the book in the context of the terrorst attacks in September 2001. So the book seems very fresh. Yet I expect it has legs as well.

Shelter from the Storm

Gitlin's MEDIA UNLIMITED starts out with a memorable joke / parable that informs much of his diagnois of the effects of media upon us: A border guard every week for twenty years stops a suspiciouis man who drives a truck across the boundary. He tears the truck apart each time and never finds anything. On the day of his retirement, the guard, promising not to turn in the "smuggler" says "I know you've been smuggling something across this border for the last 20 years. But what?" "Trucks," the smuggler tells him. Starting with a brief survey of 19th century sociogists who might provide guidance through the media "torrent," he rejects Marx (for being too trapped in the productivist mode of economic thought of his time), Weber (for not really understanding that alongside the iron cage of rationalism, the iron cage of consumer desire was being forged), and finally settles on Georg Simmel whose "grand paradox" of rationalistic money culture Gitlin summarizes this way: "a society of calculation is inhabited by people who need to feel to distract themselves from precisely the rational discpiline on which their practical lives rely," and that they "come to crave particular kinds of feelings -- disposable ones." So how do we defend ourselves against the torrent? Gitlin identifies a number of plausible navigational strategies, expressed by a typology: The Content Critics (ACT-UP, AIM), The Paranoid (the Frankfurt School, Vance Packard), The Exhibitionist (those who seek to become part of the torrent as a way to participate in the media reality), The Jammer (the hacker, John Heartfield and his anti-fascist montages are an early example), The Ironist (David Letterman, except he's part of the machine, gently gumming the hand that feeds him), The Secessionist (she tries to make her own rules and control her intake), and finally, The Abolitionist (Ted Kaczynski and other wishful thinkers). He notes that media has "by flooding people with generally inoffensive images of those unlike themselves have invited tolerance, and even more, egalitarian and antiaturhoritarian sentiments," but suggests that the larger effect of media has been "demobilization" which he explains as the "ceaseless quest for disposable feeling and pleasure [which} hollows out public life altogether." He notes that the amount of people's TV watching as described in Putnam's "Bowling Alone," is the most highly correlated factor of political (dis)engagement.This is just the bare bones of what is a challenging, insightful, and suddenly, very necessary view of media. Other good stuff includes his take on media circuses like the O.J. trial, the Lewinski scandal -- that such slowly unfolding events actually turn down the torrent to something approaching human speed and thus expose in the process the hypervelocity and emphemerality of usual media fare -- is counterintutive and true. He notes that capitalism has always capitilized on speed, always created a class of speed elites who have sought to