Media Unlimited How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives

Excerpt from Media Unlimited by Todd Gitlin. Published by Henry Holt/Metropolitan/Owl Books. All rights reserved. For all the talk, and the talk about the talk, the big story about the media slips through our fingers. The huge, obvious but weird and hard-to-grasp reality is that living with the media is today one of the main things human beings do. The most important truth about the communications we live among is not that they deceive (which they do); or that they broadcast a limiting ideology (which they do); or emphasize sex and violence (which they do); or convey diminished images of the good, the true, and the normal (which they do); or corrode the quality of art (which they also do); or reduce language (which they surely do), but that with all their lies, skews, and shallow pleasures, they surround and seep into our way of life with a promise of feeling-always there, speeding forward, flashing out of large screens and small, gushing forth in living rooms, or sliding back into the background of life, but always beckoning, always coursing onward.Gitlin, Todd is the author of 'Media Unlimited How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives', published 2003 under ISBN 9780805072839 and ISBN 0805072837.