Venerable sage of the New Left, Todd Gitlin, in his new book, resembles
nothing so much as the man who is trapped in a burning building and mistakenly
believes that the whole world is being consumed by fire. The subtitle
of the book suffices to make this point, for who--outside of New York City
where he works, and some other major metropolii--is truly being "overwhelmed"
by media images and sounds? Of course, Mr. Gitlin, as one of
the primary spokesman for the baby-boomer generation, is long accustomed
to viewing his own personal problems as indicative of a crisis for all
mankind, so readers will hardly be surprised to find that a phenomenon,
media saturation, that just barely affects most of our lives is here pronounced
the defining characteristic of our culture. But one is a bit surprised
that Mr. Gitlin fails to acknowledge his own role in creating the problem
and by his failure to grapple with how the problem could be remedied.
I say only "a bit", because the answers to the problem mostly lie in undoing
the damage that Mr. Gitlin and his cohort have done to the culture, and
it would take more moral fortitude than most of us are capable of summoning
for Mr. Gitlin to admit that his life's work has been destructive, rather
than productive, of the good life.
Mr. Gitlin is worried about the way that various forms of media and
the consumer-oriented messages they carry have come to saturate modernity.
As a threshold matter, we should note that most of the torrent that he's
speaking of us actually contained to a few major media markets. It
may well be true that as he wanders through his life he is subjected to
everything from billboards to muzac to blasting radios to continuous television,
but much of that is surely a function of living in the city.
Let him move to New Hampshire for a while, where many homes don't have
cable, any given area only gets one newspaper, radio signals fade in and
out, and there's seldom a sign in sight; he'd soon be yearning for a fix
of easy access to mass media.
At any rate, Mr. Gitlin traces the origins of media saturation to two
main springs :
Unlimited media result from a fusion of economic
expansion and individual desire...
For the first he bears no responsibility, since he has spent a lifetime
in opposition to free-market capitalism. He is correct though that
we now have more leisure time than any humans have ever had before and
many more extraordinarily inexpensive ways to entertain ourselves during
that time. Our ancestors might have been just as willing to anesthetize
themselves with inane tv programs had they had the oppurtunity, but they
had to devote much more of their time to simple survival and did not have
the disposable income to waste on insipid brain candy.
On the other hand, where the second cause is concerned, the emphasis
on and the indulgence of individual desires, Mr. Gitlin would do well to
point the finger of blame at himself. For what the various forms
of media entertainment have become is really nothing more than a substitute
for human companionship; and it was companionship in its many traditional
forms--the shared community, the family, local clubs and organizations,
etc.--that suffered the worst damage from the assaults of sixties radicals.
In their zeal to do away with the old patriarchal, corporatist, Judeo-Christian,
Anglo-Saxon institutions that dominated American society, they also did
away with much of the social fabric that knit us together into a cohesive
community of beings.
There's a phrase that Mr. Gitlin uses in passing to describe the solace
that the media offers, it allows us "To feel accompanied by others not
physically present..." It would seem that the key to his book lies
right there in that phrase as it raises the question : why are others no
longer physically present in our lives? How have we come to be so
atomized? And the answer, I would say, is that much of the blame
lies with Mr. Gitlin and his ideological fellow travelers--the Old Left
which sought to replace social structures with government programs and
the New Left which attacked the moral foundations of these traditional
social structures on the basis of racism, sexism, and the like. Where
once the nuclear and extended family was the norm, we are now left with
families where the grandparents are in a nursing home, the parents are
divorced and the one or two children are largely unsupervised.
Where people once gathered in churches, fraternal organizations, social
clubs, Boy Scout meetings and the like--each of them exclusive and discriminatory
in their own way, yet invaluable in providing a soocial setting for people
of like interests to come together and interact--today, instead, far too
many of us sit in otherwise empty rooms and watch tv by ourselves or surf
the 'net or play Nintendo, or whatever. We accompany each other so
little these days, no wonder we seek out electronic companionship, even
if just pictures and voices, to fill the emptiness of our lives.
If this analysis of what's gone wrong is accurate, then it is easy to
see why Mr. Gitlin avoids it and steers clear of the solutions that logically
flow from it. For reversing this tide of isolation would require
things like : ending subsidies for warehousing the old; returning social
services to churches and private charities; encouraging marriage and childbirth;
making divorce more difficult to obtain; allowing private organizations
to define their own membership rules, even if that means they may discriminate
against some people; and so on and so forth. It means returning to
a way of life where we were forced to depend on one another and did, where
those who accompanied us through the day were actually flesh and blood
and physically present. It means reconstituting the very institutions--family,
church, community--that the Old Left, unwittingly, and the New Left, intentionally,
spent all their energy destroying in the latter half of the 20th Century.
If you want folks to shut off the media torrent, first you need to make
sure that there will be other human beings in the room to provide them
with companionship and entertainment alternatives when they do. If
you aren't willing to face that truth, and it appears Mr. Gitlin is not,
then I'm afraid you're just adding to the sound and the fury.
(Reviewed:23-Feb-02)
Grade: (C-)
Websites:
Book-related and General Links:
-NYU
- Department of Journalism - Faculty
-opendemocracy.net
(North American editor)
-BOOK
SITE : Media Unlimited : The Torrent of Sounds and Images in Modern
Life by Todd Gitlin (Henry Holt)
-DISCUSSION
: of Media Unlimited with James Fallows (Atlantic Unbound, April 2002)
-ESSAY
: The Liberal Arts in an Age of Info-Glut (Todd Gitlin, Chronicle of
Higher Education)
-EXCERPT
: First Chapter of Sacrifice by Todd Gitlin
-ESSAY
: Cranking the Axis of Evil (Todd Gitlin, February 2002, opendemocracy)
-ESSAY
: Blaming America First : Why are some on the left, who rightly demand
sympathy for victims around the world, so quick to dismiss American suffering?
(Todd Gitlin, January/February 2002, Mother Jones)
-ESSAY
: Question Authority During War (Todd Gitlin, 11/11/01, LA Times)
-ESSAY
: Liberal Activists Finding Themselves Caught Between a Flag and
a Hard Place (Todd Gitlin, October 28, 2001, San Jose Mercury News)
-ESSAY
: The ordinariness of American feelings (Todd Gitlin, 10 October 2001,
opendemocracy)
-ESSAY
: The impossible peace : We are stretched on a moral rack, argues Todd
Gitlin, who believes Congress has failed to ask essential questions on
the ends and means of war (September 23, 2001, The Observer)
-ESSAY
: Pushovers of the press : The media elite are reviewing Henry Kissinger's
latest tome with their usual fawning gullibility. Best not to mention those
bony hands reaching out from the grave. (Todd Gitlin, 07/03/01, Salon)
-ESSAY
: Back to the civil rights barricades : What's at stake in Florida
is nothing less than the right to vote and to have it count. And once again
an angry, elitist GOP is on the wrong side. (Todd Gitlin, 12/04/00, Salon)
-ESSAY
: Survivor: the art of betrayal : What will tomorrow night's climax
reveal about the cannibal in all of us? (Todd Gitlin, August 22, 2000,
Globe & Mail)
-ESSAY
: Much ado about Chandra Levy (Todd Gitlin, 7/24/01, CS Monitor)
-ESSAY
: Pride before the fall : Ralph Nader told his supporters to cast a
vote they could be proud of. How do you spell H-U-B-R-I-S? (Todd Gitlin,
11/08/00, Salon)
-ESSAY
: Unsafe in any state : Ralph Nader's campaign is reckless, its justifications
specious and its consequences possibly irreparable. But it does allow fundamentalist
leftists to keep living in their dream world. (Todd Gitlin [10/28/00, Salon)
-ESSAY
: It's the stupidity, stupid : George W. Bush's constant gaffes and
mental lapses reflect the luxurious laziness of a scion who's never had
to work hard at anything. And the media elite has graciously awarded him
a Gentleman's C. (Todd Gitlin [10/24/00, Salon)
-ESSAY
: How Our Crowd Got Lonely (Todd Gitlin, January 9, 2000,
NY Times Book Review)
-ESSAY
: A LOOK AT . . . The AOL Deal : FEARED: It's All About Eyeballs, Baby
(Todd Gitlin, January 16, 2000, Washington Post)
-ESSAY
: The great straddler : Free trader President Clinton veers left in
Seattle. But will his finesse be enough to keep Al Gore's Democratic Party
intact? (Todd Gitlin, 12/03/99, Salon)
-ESSAY
: The End of the Absolute No (Todd Gitlin, September/October 1999,
Mother Jones)
-ESSAY
: Disappearing Ink (Todd Gitlin, September 10, 1999, NY Times)
-ESSAY
: The Uncivil Society (Todd Gitlin, New Perspectives Quarterly)
-ESSAY
: Boomerang : Why baby boomers hate Bill Clinton -- and themselves
(Todd Gitlin, 05/27/96, Salon)
-ESSAY
: Imagebusters (Todd Gitlin, December 1, 1994, American Prospect)
-TRIBUTE
: C. Wright Mills, Free Radical (Todd Gitlin)
-REVIEW
: of Blinded by the Right by David Brock (Todd Gitlin, LA Times)
-REVIEW
: of Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right by Lisa McGirr
and Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American
Consensus by Rick Perlstein (Todd Gitlin, Boston Review)
-REVIEW
: of The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New
Left in America. By Doug Rossinow (Todd Gitlin, Journal of American
History)
-REVIEW
: of THE HORIZONTAL SOCIETY By Lawrence M. Friedman (Todd Gitlin, NY
Times Book Review)
-REVIEW
: of QUENTIN TARANTINO The Man and His Movies. By Jami Bernard, QUENTIN
TARANTINO Shooting From the Hip. By Wensley Clarkson and QUENTIN TARANTINO
The Cinema of Cool. By Jeff Dawson. (Todd Gitlin, NY Times Book Review)
-REVIEW
: of On Beauty and Being Just by Elaine Scarry (Todd Gitlin, American
Prospect)
-REVIEW
: of K. Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, Color Conscious: The Political
Morality of Race (Todd Gitlin, American Prospect)
-REVIEW
: of The Paradox of American Democracy by John B. Judis (Todd Gitlin,
Washington Monthly)
-REVIEW
: of PARTING FROM PHANTOMS: Selected Writings, 1990-1994. By Christa
Wolf (Todd Gitlin, The Nation)
-REVIEW
: of TANGLED MEMORIES: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics
of Remembering. By Marita Sturken (Todd Gitlin, NY Times Book Review)
-AUDIO
DISCUSSION : ROUNDTABLE: SHOULD ACTIVISTS BE ORGANIZING AGAINST THE WAR
ON AFGHANISTAN? (Democracy Now!, 11/07/01)
-DISCUSSION
: Lowering the Bar : Are we living in an age of tabloid journalism?
Media correspondent Terence Smith and guests address this question and
assess the media's performance in the Clinton-Lewinsky matter. (Online
Newshour, February 3, 1999)
-ESSAY
: The Year of Dreaming Dangerously : This is the 30th anniversary of
a series of tumultuous events that shaped a generation. To understand the
activists of the '60s, you have to revisit 1968 and consider what it was
like to those who lived through it. (STEPHEN TALBOT, July 1998, Salon)
-ESSAY
: Repressed memory syndrome : The legendary year 1968 stills hold the
baby-boom generation in thrall -- but it was actually the pinnacle of anti-democratic
narcissism. (David Horowitz, 08/31/98, Salon)
-Salon
Directory : stories by Todd Gitlin
-ARCHIVES
: Articles by Todd Gitlin from The American Prospect
-The
New York Review of Books: Todd Gitlin
-SLATE
BOOKCLUB : Media Unlimited by Todd Gitlin (Sarah Lyall and Nell Minow,
Slate)
-REVIEW
: of MEDIA UNLIMITED: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms
Our Lives By Todd Gitlin (JEFFREY SCHEUER, LA Times)
-REVIEW
: of Media Unlimited (Steven Martinovich, Enter Stage Right)
-REVIEW
: of Media Unlimited (Steve Weinberg, CS Monitor)
-REVIEW
: of Media Unlimited (Paul McLeary, Flak)
-REVIEW
: of The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars
by Todd Gitlin (Phillip E. Johnson, Books & Culture)
-REVIEW
: of Twilight of Common Dreams (Brett Grainger, Sojourners)
-REVIEW
: of SACRIFICE By Todd Gitlin (Judith Dunford, NY Times Book
Review)
GENERAL :
-ARCHIVES
: Mass Media & Journalism (PopMatters)
-ESSAY
: Which god has failed (Paul Hollander, The New Criterion)
-REVIEW
: of Howard Brick. Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in
the 1960s (J. David Hoeveler, American Historical Review)
