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This book examines the explicit and implicit logic operating in claims of media influence. Beginning with a close analysis of arguments by four critical voices - Dwight Macdonald, Daniel Boorstin, Stuart Ewen and Neil Postman - on the nature of media influence, the author demonstrates how they mobilize three dominant metaphors - media as information, media as art, and media as education. She then examines the historical and intellectual roots of these concepts in American social and cultural thought and explores media as a new technology as a means for more positive expectations of media influence. The book closes with a section considering how debates on postmodernism redirect but do not resolve the basic contradictions in social and cultural thought.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Part 1 Four Critical Voices
• Dwight Macdonald
• The Media as Mass Culture
• Daniel Boorstin
• The Media as Spectacular Illusion
• Stuart Ewen
• The Media as Ideological Apparatus
• Neil Postman
• The Media as Corrosive Amusement
• Macdonald, Boorstin, Ewen, Postman
• What the Media Do
• Part 2 Media In Modernity
• The Possibility of Progress
• The Modernity Story
• The Duality of Modernity
• The Modern as Mass Society
• American Modernity
• Media
• Modernity as Inauthentic Other
• Polluting the Future
• The World of Tomorrow
• Media as New Technologies
• Media as Technological Progress
• Part 3 Three Dominant Metaphors
• The Media as Art
• The Media as Information
• The Media as Education
• Conclusions
• Part 4 Characteristics Of Media Discourse
• Essential Worth
• Lowest Common Denominator?
• Egalitarian Elitism
• The Contamination Theme
• Blurring Boundaries
• The Pure and the Polluting
• Media Minglings
• Corruption and Deflection
• Part 5 Recognition And Reconceptualizations
• Media Power
• Redemptive Forms
• Historical Trajectories
• Immanence as Transcendence
• Consequences of Reconceptualization
• Recognizing the Dream

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CHOICE Review

This book is essentially a rhetorical analysis of media criticism--a sort of meta-criticism--wherein the critical narrative of the media's impact on society is juxtaposed and skillfully connected to the larger narrative on mondernity. The text begins by analyzing four media perspectives: Dwight Macdonald's media as mass culture, Daniel Boorstin's media as spectacular illusion, Stuart Ewen's media as ideological apparatus, and Neil Postman's media as corrosive amusement. Next appears a consideration of modernity where the tension between modernity and tradition--between society's disintegration and liberation-- is developed. Within the broader context, the author examines the narratives of media criticism and the attendant metaphors of media as art, media as information, and media as education. The book concludes with chapters on the characteristics of media discourse and reconceptualization. This is a creative and original study. There is none quite like it. By situating media criticism within the broader modernity debate, the author truly sheds new light on an old subject. An index, references, and supporting notes appear. Highly recommended. For sophisticated undergraduates and graduate students. W. E. Coleman Mount Union College