Just finished a quick careen through Todd Gitlin's new book Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms our Lives. It's not worth much more attention than that, I think. It's padded heavily with rambling glibly worded illustrations and lists of examples.
Its best points are references to interesting statistics and quotes from other sources. I've extracted my choices here. First, stats, paraphrased from the book, pp. 16-18:
In 1999 Americans spent an average of three hours a day actively watching television. (One survey of 43 nations showed the US ranking third in viewing hours, after Japan and Mexico.) Of American children 8-18, 65% have a TV in their bedrooms, 86% a radio. 42% of all American households with children have the TV on "most of the time" according to survey responses.
...and some quotes:
Nietzsche in The Gay Science (1882) wrote:
One is ashamed of resting, and prolonged reflection almost gives people a bad conscience. One thinks with a watch in one's hand, even as one eats one's midday meal while reading the latest news of the stock market; one lives as if one might "miss out on something."... Virtue has come to consist of doing something in less time than someone else. [p. 73]
Historian James Truslow Adams wrote in 1931:
...a resident of New York to-day is getting more sensations and of a more varied sort than the Neanderthal... As the number of sensations increase, the time which we have for reacting to and digesting them becomes less... [S]uch a life tends to become a mere search for more and more exciting sensations, undermining yet more our power of concentration in thought. Relief from fatigue and ennui is sought in mere excitation of our nerves, as in speeding cars or emotional movies. [p. 74]
These two interestingly dated citations could suffice to summarize the book. For the most part, Gitlin merely embellishes with current examples. Two more pithy quotes and we're done. The first is a summary of historian Gary Cross's work:
In Cross's view, the Great Depression was a turning point, frigthening workers with the burden of an impoverished free time. After World War II, pent-up consumer demand for a high-consumption way of life was boosted by government subsidies (via the low-interest mortgages and expensive highways that helped suburbanize the country). The die was cast: the public would choose money over [liesure] time, preferring to seek its pleasures and comforts in the purchase of goods guaranteed to grow ever more swiftly obsolescent rather than in the search for collective leisure -- or civic virtue.[pp. 78-9]
And lastly, another anti-TV fact. Gitlin takes this one from Robert D. Putnam's Bowling Alone:
According to surveys from 1994 and 1995, the more television people said they watched, the less likely they were to be registered to vote. ... The additional hour a day Americans on average spent in front of the TV in 1995 as compared to 1965 might account, by itself, for "perhaps one-quarter of the entire drop in civil engagement".[p. 166]