All media, all the time

Author looks into a world of 'Media Unlimited'

Author Todd Gitlin: "Can't address the big fact that the bulk of life is taking place under the pressure of an onslaught of images."

(CNN) -- You are surrounded by media.

That's because, writes Todd Gitlin in his book "Media Unlimited" (Metropolitan Books, March), in modern society, media are impossible to escape. Even in the middle of that nowhere, you can probably hum a song you heard on the radio, remember the plot of an old "Brady Bunch" episode, or envision the Coca-Cola logo.

The media form a glue that binds us together -- and it's driving us crazy.

"I think we have a national attention deficit disorder," says Gitlin, a professor of culture, journalism and sociology at New York University, in a phone interview from New York. "Because we're so itchy. We're changing the channel, the camera is constantly moving, the edits are flying thick and fast."

It's a trend that's having an adverse influence on successive generations, he says.

"I think probably the worst effect is on the mentality of young people, who expect everything to wiggle," he says.

'Lots of blips'

Gitlin says he sees it among his own students, many of whom -- despite their presence at one of the top universities in the country -- are unable to put two sentences together in a logical fashion.

"I see this steady impatience," he says, "and I see this difficulty in forming connections (between thoughts). I see paragraphs with no beginning or end." Gitlin's students think in "lots of blips," he says, and -- like many of us -- crave an instant emotional association and stimulus from a readily providing society.

We didn't get here accidentally, he points out in "Media Unlimited." Starting in the 1700s by some analysis, individuals separated their feelings from their external workaday lives. Consumer society catered to the desire to feel, to make emotional connections, because feeling was a large part of individuality.

As time wore on, "Modernity ... produced a culture devoted to sentiment," Gitlin writes. The novels of the 18th century led to the "penny press, circuses, minstrel and Wild West shows in the 19th, through to the Viacoms, Disneys, NBCs and Sonys of today."

"I think we all learn to navigate amidst this," he says in the interview. "We're all at the receiving end of this profusion of sound and images. ... As a result, since few of us want to take this lying down, we devise means of navigating it."

Gitlin divides these styles of navigation into several groups: the "fans," who identify with others who like the same thing; the "paranoids," who fear the power of media; the "ironists," who try to stand outside the media by knowing their insides; the "jammers," who turn images against their producers; and on and on.

"These all try to give us some balance," he says. "But they can't address the big fact that the bulk of life is taking place under the pressure of an onslaught of images."

'September 11 is the exception'

Nowadays, those images come from almost anywhere, from billboards to television to the Internet. But Gitlin saves some of his sharpest criticism for journalism -- particularly broadcast news -- which purports to attempt to tell the truth about our daily lives, but manipulates (and is manipulated by) powerful images and a pack mentality.

Gitlin: "When bin Laden bombed the embassies in '98, what TV and print were obsessed with was not terrorism -- but Monica Lewinsky."

"When bin Laden bombed the embassies in '98, what TV and print were obsessed with was not terrorism -- but Monica Lewinsky," he says. "That's an example of a collective failure of intelligence."

Then there was Gitlin's own experience. In 1991, NBC was putting together a piece on former 1960s antiwar protesters and their opinions on the Gulf War. A crew filmed Gitlin for four hours, during which time Gitlin said that, while he was not "hostile to American troops," he opposed the war. What came out was a short on-camera sound bite that implied he supported the war.

"I had walked into (the correspondent's) script," he writes. "It's a mistake I haven't made since."

But real life is still capable of cutting through the cacophony and simplification, Gitlin observes.

He mostly wrote "Media Unlimited" in 1999 and 2000, but he had a chance to address the events of September 11 while going over the galleys.

"September 11 is the exception to what I'm writing about," he says. "The attacks were momentous, and the immediate reaction was, at best, real journalism. There was information to get out and an honest effort to control rumors."

Still, in general, the various media will give the people what they want, he says. Toward the end of the book, Gitlin quotes a CBS vice president for television research. The executive's speech eerily echoes Ned Beatty's defense of capitalism at the end of the 1976 film "Network": "I'm not interested in culture. I'm not interested in pro-social values," the executive told Gitlin. "I have only one interest. That's whether people watch the program. That's my definition of good, and that's my definition of bad."

Gitlin isn't a Luddite standing against modern civilization and all its comforts. But he does encourage people to take a step back and think about what they're generally immersed in.

"Are we willing to pay the price (of modern civilization)? If so, fine," he says. "But let's do it consciously."