IF THERE IS a single symbol of media overkill, it’s the crawl. Resurrected in the first hours of Sept. 11, the crawl was originally meant to get critical information out to TV viewers while major events were unfolding on camera. Six months later, the cable-news networks still use the crawl, 24 hours a day, to tell us things like (no kidding) “U.S. mint in Philadelphia to shut down for a month” or “Internet usage down, study says.” The crawl is so insipid that it makes the on-air talent look profound.
Todd Gitlin never goes after the crawl in “Media Unlimited,” but he takes shots at pretty much everything else. He laments the dumbing down of books and movies; he deplores the asinine ubiquity of television and advertising. Mostly, though, he is concerned about the sheer volume of what we see and hear, and sometimes read–a “torrent” that floods our daily lives, drowning the life of the mind and sweeping us toward consumptionist fantasy.
Media saturation in the old days, it turns out, was slightly different from what we experience now. Tocqueville wrote of early Americans: “There is hardly a pioneer’s hut that does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare.” And the media of the 18th and 19th centuries–meaning books and the popular press–had their virtuous uses. For one thing, Gitlin notes, they “opened up space for sympathy, helping to undermine theocracy and slavery.”
But then something happened. New forms of entertainment appeared, and the cost of entertainment plummeted. In the 1700s, a theater ticket cost more than a full day’s wage; today cable TV, assuming it actually does entertain, costs about a hundredth. Our forms of story-telling got stupider, too: Melville begat John Barrymore, who begat Drew Barrymore, who begat Tom (“Freddy Got Fingered”) Green.
But stupidity is not the half of it. The media are so pervasive, so all-encompassing, so unavoidable, Gitlin claims, that we no longer separate them from ourselves. They become the single medium in which we live. We pass by dozens of billboards in a day while wearing corporate logos on our shirts; we hear Muzak versions of pop songs while we shop and then put on a Walkman while we exercise; we choose from hundreds of TV channels every day and from about four new movies at the multiplex each week.
Gitlin thinks we owe this absurd state of existence to a crucial decision in our social and technological development, when machines took over from handicrafts and rural labor. He writes that “in the early decades of the twentieth century, Americans, employers and workers alike, made a sort of bargain about what to do with the increased productivity that equipment and training permitted.” Instead of agreeing on a European-style pattern of life, mixing regulated labor and state-managed culture and leisure, Americans “settled on a speed-up that would link production, acquisition, and obsolescence.”
This was a fatal mistake, apparently. Gitlin quotes the words of the sociologist David Frisby, who argued that “the tedium of the production process is compensated for by the artificial stimulation and amusement of consumption.” Gitlin believes that “media” is the primary object of consumption in modern life, and a good deal of “media” promotes consumption itself.
Gitlin is not happy about this, and for good reason. There is something appalling about the constant hucksterism, spin and hyped nonsense that surrounds us. Still, the ultimate value of “Media Unlimited” is, well, limited.
For one thing, Gitlin defines “media” too broadly: Surely there is a difference between art such as “The Seven Samurai” and “The Philadelphia Story,” and crude commerce, such as “Fear Factor,” although each qualifies for Gitlin’s “media” label at one point or another. Second, as Gitlin seems to realize at times, we have become extremely good at tuning out a lot of the media culture around us, ignoring most of the messages, indeed hardly even noticing them.
True, there is overkill, particularly in the news media, and there is inanity in entertainment, yet when push comes to shove it is better to be over-informed than not informed enough. And surely entertainment is still voluntary. Gitlin worries that the media feed consumerist appetites. But is that in itself always a bad thing? One man’s stupid pleasure is another man’s good taste. Gitlin himself is often quoted in the media: Surely he believes that there is some value in allowing his words to be used in this way.
However, if there is a problem with the media torrent, it may be more serious than even Gitlin lets on. In “Shows About Nothing” (2000), Thomas Hibbs put forth the proposition that American popular culture undermines democracy by fostering a soft, comfortable nihilism. Far from endorsing the wrong ideals, Hibbs believed, popular culture makes the whole idea of right and wrong seem ridiculous. Meanwhile, the high decibel level and nonstop message-sending of modern media culture have a leveling effect, too, implying that no one event is more important than another.
The banality of the crawl is thus the banality of journalistic nihilism. The closing of the U.S. mint? The discovery of anthrax? Monica’s latest escapade? We don’t know what’s news and what’s entertainment, what’s right and what’s wrong. Gitlin worries that we are goaded too much to buy things. It might be worse, and perhaps it is.
Jonathan V. Last is online editor of The Weekly Standard.
