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 draw the slow into their slipstream toward a speedy MBA utopia, but that this speed elite has also fostered slow amusements as an antidote. They sell us the speed because they are afraid of becoming "roadkill," while others, like Martha Stewart, sell us the antidote. He also notes that the "hot" Manichean world of the media, conservatives play better than liberals. And further that the atomization of events and individualzation of the news has the effect of discrediting systematic, systemic views of society. Police brutality, anyone?
He also touches on something worthy of further investigation. Citing a CNN announcer who gestured to his new $70 million studio as the house that Lewinsky built, Gitlin notes the media has only a scant penchant for examining its ultimate motive: making money for the investor class. While we consumers of news and entertainment know that intellectually, emotionally, in the face of the never ending torrent the media is reified -- it feels eternal, god-like, self-perpetuating -- and so we somehow forget. We are so sucked into the stimulus -- even feelings of opprobrium and disgust -- that we forget that media is all about making money through that stimulus: getting and selling eyeballs.
There's a sign in New York City near 42nd Street (home of the "newscrawl" which have become so prevalent on TV screens these days) which calculates the average American's share of the national debt. Imagine if the networks were enjoined to run, next to their embossed logos, how much money has been made year-to-date. Other intermittent crawls could show the highest and lowest prices paid for a commercial slot that year, or the year-to-date highest rated show, etc. We know how much the consumer goods we buy cost and what they contain because of labeling laws, but media comes with no such information. Since experts can't agree on the harmfulness or impact of television (though Gitlin tips the balance pretty strongly here), it seems the least that could be done would be a visible running tally of the money made. This would at least remind us of the most important function of media -- to make lots of money for media moguls and their speculators.
Gitlin's last book excited critics from the left and the right. I predict more of the same for MEDIA UNLIMITED, although, I suspect the right will merely say that the media is a liberal mouthpiece, when in fact, with a few hiccups here and there, this "truck" is conservative to the core, creating, supporting and maintaining consumer desire.
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