Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives.(Book Review)

Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives. Todd Gitlin. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2002.

In his latest book about US mass media, sociologist Todd Gitlin implores readers to take media images and sounds more seriously by contemplating the impact of their torrent, in its totality, on individuals and society. Gitlin has been fascinated with the subject of media processes and effects since his earliest interactions with the news media in the 1960s as president of Students for a Democratic Society, which became the focus of his book, The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left. That work, plus his later book, Inside Prime Time, offers substantial insights into modern mass media and US culture.

Media Unlimited, however, pales in comparison to those earlier offerings because the author's subject--the cumulative impact of all kinds of media sounds and images on ordinary individuals--is far too broad and elusive to be adequately explored in 200 pages. Gitlin acknowledges this shortcoming in his introduction, which explains that he is moving beyond "manageable" questions about media impact in this work and, as such, could not possibly learn everything he needed to know about the topic before he sat down to write.

Gitlin offers a wide variety of statistics to demonstrate that audiences are exposed to a greater number of media messages today than in the past, and that they have become more willing to simply consume "whatever's on." While doing so, they encounter countless sounds and images that offer only ephemeral traces as they flash by at speeds faster than ever before and using communication devices that are increasingly portable. The result is a fast society containing fast people who live in a fast culture and are confronted endlessly by media messages that intrude more than ever into all aspects of their lives. Important questions thus arise: "How fast can montage go without leaving perception behind? How much shorter than seven seconds can a sound bite shrink? How much quicker can ...