Media Unlimited
by Todd Gitlin
Metropolitan Books

See if this sounds familiar: You're on the couch, flipping the channels, engaged for 10 minutes here, five minutes there with shows that pique your interest. The only trouble is, when they cut to commercial and you cut to another channel, you end up forgetting the program you just mentally noted to come back to. It's only later that you realize, if you bother to think of it at all, that if asked you couldn't describe, or even recall, anything you just watched.

It's a strange and somewhat unnerving feeling to hardly recollect how you spent an evening, yet there seems to be something about our contemporary media that defies long-term memory. If it's any consolation, you're not alone. Is it a sign of moral bankruptcy that leads to our consent to quicker, cheaper and less demanding modes of entertainment, or is it something intrinsic to Western, liberal cosmopolitan culture that keeps us always in search of the newest content provider to stream information into increasingly harried lives?

In his new book, "Media Unlimited," sociologist Todd Gitlin argues the latter view, writing that these "nonstop mass-produced images and sounds are central elements of our civilization," and in such a culture, "there is no choice but to navigate. Sink or swim." Sounds vaguely like a threat. But is it?

Beginning with the concept of what he calls "iconic plentitude," in which "to grow up in this culture is to grow into an expectation that images and sounds will be there for us on command, and that the stories that they compose will be succeeded by still other stories, all bidding for our attention, all striving to make sense, all, in some sense, ours," Gitlin argues that what we are experiencing, much like globalization itself, is merely an intensification of processes long since at work, to which we have become accustomed through a culture that values innovation, speed and ease of use.

In the hyper-specialized realm of American mass media, controlled by a dwindling number of multinational mega-corporations, content is king only insofar as it is able to move units and sustain a certain level of profitability. Living in a market-driven society, there is nothing surprising — or even particularly wrong about that — but in our day-to-day lives, this twirling, flashing, shouting attempt to capture our attention for a few moments has led to a glut of uninspired, unfulfilling media that's so close to us we barely recognize we're experiencing it.

While cultural critics bemoan the "dumbing down" of the citizenry through the constant bombardment of images and sounds, Gitlin takes a more studied approach to the subject. Gitlin agrees that "broadcast dissemination does not discriminate well between the trivial and the momentous," causing us to become obsessed with the absurdity of the O.J. Simpson trial while paying relatvely little attention to things like systematic genocide in Rwanda. Unfortunately, he seems to think we're only able to react to the media and are powerless to seek out our own information and form opinions.

Talk about the centrality of mass-produced images to our culture continues sporadically throughout the book. But its crux doesn't arrive until half-way through, with most of what comes before seeming like filler trying to prime us for Gitlin's ultimate argument. One of the odder sections of the book concerns a too-lengthy discussion of the number of words and punctuation marks in the first sentences of magazine articles and novels over the past century. Gitlin includes charts that seem to prove his exercise pointless, as in many cases the change is negligible. In any case, even if the change were greater, it proves little more than the fact that language is elastic and tends to change over time, and not necessarily that we have shorter attention spans now than previous generations. Why, after all, should something written in 1896, or even 1936, read the same as something written in 1996? Should the punctuation be the same? Word count? Of course it shouldn't, and it can't, unless we have stopped growing as a culture. Should "Moll Flanders" have the same linguistic structure as "London Fields"? We should hope not.

What Gitlin spends all this time getting at is an exposition of his categorization system for naming the ways we respond to the media (again, which it seems he believes is all we can hope to do). Each of us, he holds, can be categorized in one of seven different ways: as a fan, critic, ironist, paranoid, jammer, secessionist or an abolitionist.

The fan selectively over-identifies with media icons; the critic, conversely, "tries to keep a certain distance from the foam to avoid a soaking" but assumes that the world would be a better place if the nature of the content were more intellectually stimulating. The paranoid sees conspiracy at every turn, exemplified in academia by the Frankfurt School of social criticism. The exhibitionist is an eager participant in the media torrent (where would our reality-show obsession be without a steady supply of these?), the ironist is "confident that the spectacle is nothing but weightless contrivances" and the jammer uses the media's images against it, like the cyberpunk literary movement of the '80s and early '90s attempted, with varying degrees of success. Finally, the secessionist is one who eschews e-mail and cell phones and tries to plug her ears to the sounds and images that bombard us, while the abolitionist finds meaning in trying to bring the system down, like the anarchists who have co-opted the anti-globalization movement, or extreme cases like the Unabomber or violent environmental groups.

An interesting take overall, but Gitlin fails to recognize the obvious — that each of us is a little bit of each of these categories rolled into one. We are complex animals who respond to situations in different and often surprising ways. Each of us has abolitionist tendencies and has probably personally boycotted certain products for ideological reasons just as we all yearn for the little thrill we receive when we see our name in print, satisfying our exhibitionist proclivities.

What Gitlin ignores — purposefully, one assumes — are the wider social ramifications of some of our newest media outlets. As Cass Sunstein points out in his slight, yet excellent, book "Republic.com," is that our media, while providing a thin conception of cultural assimilation, estrange us from one another in a very real way. Sunstein focuses his account on the Internet, and so is more limited in scope than Gitlin, but his points translate to our media culture in general. As the range of our media choices grow, we find little niches in which we are most comfortable, and tend to stay there. While we used to have to rely on the local newspaper and television news for our information, and therefore were forced to listen to views with which we disagreed, now, thanks to the "Daily Me," or personalized information resources, we are exposed only to the information we choose. Our connection to the larger world is actually stunted by the overly specific agitprop espoused by specialty websites and the explosion of content-specific cable television channels, rather than expanded by our immersion in the promise of the new media.

In the end, Gitlin's point about the "torrent of images and sounds" being an indispensable part of our culture is well made, and it is a point that many theorists, unfortunately, display a tendency to ignore in their race to coin snappy terms to describe our lot. The postmodern condition has become a central feature of Western, liberal culture, and the free flow of ideas, goods and services no doubt creates a system constantly in flux. To be sure, the media glut has intensified in the postwar years, but just as it grows, so does our ability to process large amounts of information quickly, discarding what we don't need while holding close those issues and events we find important to our lives. Where Gitlin falters, however, is in failing to offer a comprehensive overview of just how we process information in our fast-moving age. He teases the reader constantly with this possibility throughout the book, but his simplistic "styles of navigation" argument ends up coming just short of delivering on this promise.

— Paul McLeary (pjmcleary@yahoo.com)