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 New Part Three - April 24: James Fallows Todd Gitlin Part Two - April 12: James Fallows Todd Gitlin Part One - April 3: James Fallows Todd Gitlin Todd Gitlin is the author of eight previous books, including The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars (1995), The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (1987), Inside Prime Time (1983), and the award-winning novel Sacrifice (1999). He is the North American editor of the Web site openDemocracy.net and a member of the editorial boards of Dissent, The American Scholar, and The Journal of Human Rights. He is a professor of culture, journalism, and sociology at New York University. James Fallows is The Atlantic's national correspondent and the author of Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy (1996) and of Free Flight: From Airline Hell to a New Age of Travel. To learn about his new book and look through an archive of his recent articles, visit jamesfallows.com. Previously in Fallows@large: Policies of Power (December 6, 2001) James Fallows exchanges e-mail with Walter Russell Mead, the author of Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. Beyond the Tech Bubble (August 29, 2001) An e-mail exchange with Michael Lewis, the author of Next: The Future Just Happened. The Waste Land (June 21, 2001) An e-mail exchange with Alex Kerr, the author of Dogs and Demons. More by James Fallows More on books More on politics and society Join the conversation in Post & Riposte. |
fallows@large | Dialogues with James Fallows  An exchange with Todd Gitlin, the author of Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives ..... From: James Fallows To: Todd Gitlin Subject: The weirdness of being awash in media Dear Todd (if I may):
Any comparable room now, you say, would be incomparably more exposed to signals from the outside world. There would probably be a TV screen, connected to dozens or hundreds of channels, depending whether it had cable or a satellite dish, and potentially connected to thousands of recorded movies via a tape or disk player. There could be a computer screen, which in turn could be connected to practically anything. A radio. Heaps of newspapers, magazines, and books. Posters on the wall. In short, more information, more representation, more media offering virtual connections to people, places, and ideas that a person has never come across in real life. The consequences of this media richness, and whether it should be viewed as torrent or feast, are the subjects of your book. I thought about the argument in moments like these in the last few days:
I will leave it to you to explain enough about Media Unlimited's main thesis to interest readers, without telling so much that people feel they've gotten the op-ed-style gist of the book and don't need to consult the original text. I will point out one theme that distinguishes this book from several other recent works of "media criticism," including previous works of your own. In this book you're not really talking about the contents of the typical sitcom, TV-news broadcast, music video, or action movie. You're mainly emphasizing how much of the stuff there is. That is: the much fretted-over differences between Letterman and Koppel seem less important than the similarities between them, in that the shows are both televised distractions at times when people might otherwise have gone to sleep. The Fox network and PBS, National Geographic and Maxim —they're different but they're similar, you're saying. The medium is the message, right? Or, the media, in their abundance, are the message of an over-stimulated life. From Atlantic Unbound: In Media Res: "Out of Context" (June 11, 1997) What happens when the media become our reality? It's a question cyberjournalists ought to ask themselves. By Wen Stephenson I'm sure you'll correct the nuances I've missed. But for now, let me ask you a couple of questions about your book and the associated world-view. First, what's new in what you're saying? I don't mean that in a "positioning" way—how this book is different from other recent theories of the press, or how your idea is distinguished from the concept of "continuous partial attention," often credited to Linda Stone, formerly of Microsoft. Nor do I mean it in a faddish or dismissive way. What's important about life is often precisely what is not new. What I'm asking is how this fits, or doesn't fit, into a quite long tradition of critiques of technological society. Since at least the time of the Renaissance, each new decade has brought new ideas, new machines, and new possibilities, and each of those in turn has brought new stimulus and choice into people's lives. For instance, at just about the time of Vermeer's painting, Pascal was writing his famous line in the Pensées, that all of mankind's troubles could be traced to people's inability to sit quietly in a room. This is a variant of what you seem to be saying—and it applied to the woman sitting at the spinet. The Education of Henry Adams, written more than a century ago, is America's best-known cautionary argument about the effects of "progress." These are hardly insulting comparisons for your argument. But they raise an "it was ever thus" possibility. Is your book, perhaps, like the "kids today…." complaint that has been heard from grownups since the time of Plato? In any given human lifespan, the pace of stimulus steps up between a person's childhood and his later years. Is it perhaps inevitable that any person of, ummmm, a certain age will feel that life is going too fast? Second, I wonder if you could sharpen, for readers here, your contention about what aspects of the modern media you consider most worrisome. Over at least the last decade, all sorts of harms have been associated with the modern media. Some people (including me) have talked about the impact on civic life and the conduct of politics. Others talk about gender stereotypes or race relations. Or desensitization to violence. Or the hyping of a commercial, consumer culture. Or the bulldozing of local cultures around the world. Or obesity and the era of couch potatoes. Or the psychological effects of living, thinking, and perceiving in three-second intervals. Your book actually mentions all these problems, and others. But to be concerned with all of them is like having a State of the Union speech with 50 "top priority" programs. What's the big problem, from your point of view? What's the main message or two you'd like us to take from the analysis? Finally, I have a third question that assumes an answer to question number two. I think you're mainly concerned about the psychological or philosophical effects of a media torrent. That is, you're in the Pascal camp more than in the others. And I'd like to challenge the Pascal view with the most intriguing counter argument I've seen to it. It comes from a man named David Weinberger, in a new book called Small Pieces Loosely Joined. This book expresses a philosophy that's basically 180-degrees opposite yours. The modern, technology-driven media are making people more human, it says. And in particular it says this about the modern media age: There is more and more to distract us—more [Internet] sites to visit, more arguments to jump into, more dirty pictures to download, more pure wastes of time. The fact that the Web is distracting is not an accident. It is the Web's hyperlinked nature to pull our attention here and there. But it is not clear that this represents a weakening of our culture's intellectual powers, a lack of focus.... Maybe set free in a field of abundance, our hunger moves us from three meals a day to day-long grazing.... Perhaps the Web isn't shortening our attention span. Perhaps the world is just getting more interesting.Weinberger is writing about the Internet in particular, but this could be taken as an endorsement of "continuous partial attention" in general. Is he wrong? Jim Fallows
Next Page: Todd Gitlin - April 3
Part Two - April 12: James Fallows | Todd Gitlin New Part Three - April 24: James Fallows | Todd Gitlin
What do you think? Join the conversation in Post & Riposte. More on books in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly. More on politics and society in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly. Copyright © 2002 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. | [an error occurred while processing this directive] | |||||
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