Author: Todd Gitlin

Publisher: Metropolitan Books  (New York, 2002)

Book Reviewed By: Claudio Campuzano

In Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives, prominent media scholar and author Todd Gitlin has taken on the task of looking at how the media shape-and are shaped by-our lives in a post-industrial world.

The 'torrent' of the subtitle is the driving theme of the book. Of the four chapters of this quite brief book, we find the first devoted to explaining the origins and effects of this torrent. Beginning with the master painter Vermeer of the Delft school of 17th century Holland, Gitlin traces the provenance of media saturation.

Through works of art, the residents of Delft had available to them an alternate visual reality through which they could experience emotions other than those they experienced in their own lives. It is this desire for a virtual reality that has driven humans into the television age and beyond.

Relying on the writings of an often overlooked contemporary of Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Gitlin argues that our urban, money-economy society is one that is, on the surface, very calculating, but needs a steady stream of 'disposable emotions' to distract itself from its own rational discipline.

Gitlin charts the rise of the media age as an effort to create these ever more personalized and individualized distractions for the increasingly leisured population. The success of a money-economy is that it begets leisure, but this leisure is used more and more to escape the oppression of the society itself, and it does this through the consumption of media. But the power of any given media innovation to distract eventually wears off and new, ever-shinier baubles are needed for people to play with. This is the pattern that has led to media supersaturation.

Gitlin goes on describe how speed-the first cousin of saturation-affects us; how it shrinks more and more action into less and less time; how it is an unstoppable force that overwhelms us; how some people will struggle (albeit ineffectively) against it; how it disorients us; how it makes us uneasy; but also how, ultimately, it is enjoyable.

Saturation and speed are thus the two defining characteristics of the torrent. How, then, do we cope with their unsettling, overwhelming effects? Gitlin spends the third chapter describing strategies that we use to deal with the disorientation. These strategies are not curative, however, but are merely palliative. Some of us give in, some resist, some try to beat the torrent at its own game, some joke, some drop out. But we all, no matter how hard we try, live in and with the torrent.

The fourth and final chapter argues that it is not just cultural forces that make American media such a powerful force, but that it is something within all of us-our collective id or inner child-that demands amusement.

The 'torrent' is indeed a great metaphor for this book because-to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, another prominent media scholar-the message is the medium; Gitlin's engaging prose crashes along at breakneck speed, twitching hyperactively like the culture of speed he describes. Each page is filled with references to and insights on our culture of media. Some of these insights are fresh, some cliché. All are well-told. But somehow these observations are frighteningly reminiscent of the montage of seven-second soundbites he warns us of: quick, exciting, well-produced, immediately satisfying. Each, in itself, makes for a very entertaining cocktail party piece, but when strung together in a book, they form not a coherent argument, but an impressionistic portrait of contemporary society. By skipping along at such a hyperkinetic pace, Gitlin manages to avoid anything but passing profundity. He remains forever descriptive, never prescriptive, and always glib. The last paragraph could be no better example:

"I do not pretend to have definitive answers to the questions posed by a life immersed in images, sounds, and stories [...] I propose that we stop-and imagine the whole phenomenon freshly, taking the media seriously as more than a cornucopia of wondrous gadgets or a collection of social problems, but as a central condition of an entire way of life. Perhaps if we step away and stare at the whole, we will know what we want to do about it besides change channels."

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Claudio Campuzano is a student at the Rockefeller Graduate School of Public Affairs in Albany, NY.

03/20/2002