"One of the things that really annoys me at CNN, one of the very few, of course, professor, is that crawl that's always going along the bottom of the screen," Dobbs said during a recent show, and asked Gitlin what he thought of the scrolling banner across the bottom of the screen, a staple on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC ever since Sept. 11.

"I think the snippet isn't good for much by way of contributing to understanding," said Gitlin, a professor of culture and sociology at New York University and author of the new book "Media Unlimited."

"I think this is one of many weird phenomena that contributes to a national attention deficit disorder."The crawl -- that stream of info-morsels and promotional hooks that seemed so urgent right after Sept. 11, but now seems so annoying and distracting -- seems to carry Gitlin's point with it as it creeps across the screen.

"In a sense there's a crawl running across our lives in general," Gitlin said recently in an interview conducted with appropriate irony -- he was talking on a cellphone, stuck in traffic on the Hollywood Freeway while on an author tour promoting his book on various media outlets.

"There's music flooding into the hotel where I'm staying, video screens all over the airport and on the plane, people sending and receiving information on their Blackberrys. The culture is twitching with this overload, with this rather doomed attempt to give us the illusion we are coping with all this stimuli."

'Central experience'

"Media Unlimited" definitely aims for the big picture, as Gitlin pulls together video games, the Internet, Hollywood blockbusters, Muzak, books, advertising, popular music and, of course, television -- the whole 24/7 brain-bulging shebang. This "media torrent" is not just some adjunct to our lives, he writes: "Living with the media is today one of the main things Americans and many other human beings do"; it has moved from "an accompaniment to life" to "a central experience of life."

"Media Unlimited" builds on a foundation of many books chronicling the addictive superficiality of our culture: Alvin Toffler's "Future Shock," Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death," James Gleick's "Faster," Bill McKibben's "The Age of Missing Information."

Part of that tradition involves updating the familiar but necessary statistics. The average American child lives in a home with 2.9 TV sets, 1.8 VCRs, 3.1 radios, 2.6 tape players, 2.1 CD players, 1.4 video game players and 1 computer. The average sound bite of a presidential candidate on network news shrank from 42 seconds in 1968 to 7.8 seconds in 2000. In his own admittedly small and unscientific sampling, Gitlin found that the average sentence length in best-sellers decreased from 23 words in 1936 to 13 words in 2001.

When confronted with this, we tend to say that we are living in the Information Age, where we get more data faster than at any time in history. That may be, he believes, but information is generally less important in the media onslaught than the feelings it evokes, and that keeps us coming back for another emotional fix.

Disposable emotions

We live, Gitlin writes, in "the age of disposable feelings: Each hot, breaking, unsurpassed, amazing, overwhelming event fades, superseded by sequels; each 'crime of the century' dissolves into the next, only to be recycled in the form of TV collages, magazine and movie of the week 'specials,' instant books, branded sound bites and video clips, chat groups and instant polls, each cross-referenced to previous spectacles, each assigned meanings by choruses of pundits and focus groups, each instantly labeled unique, unforgettable."

Thus we careen from news coverage of the Canadian figure skaters to Danielle van Dam to Andrea Yates to Fox's "Celebrity Boxing," each eliciting some quick, disposable emotional response from the consumer. As Gitlin writes, it's: "the wow! of salaciousness, the aha! of mastery, the click of understanding, the what? of astonishment."

Seen through this lens, the ongoing ratings battle between CNN and Fox News may not be so much about ideology -- who's left, who's right, who's balanced. Perhaps Fox has siphoned off so much of CNN's audience because it is better at appealing to viewers' feelings with personalities such as the "angry common man" persona of Bill O'Reilly.

"That makes sense," says Gitlin, who doesn't address Fox vs. CNN in "Media Unlimited." "It doesn't please me that [Fox News Chairman] Roger Ailes is such an acute observer of the national sensibility, but in this case he appears to be."

Evasion of responsibility

And that's the respectable news coverage. Other tributaries that feed the torrent -- advertising, pop music, video games, most movies -- barely pretend to impart information. They are designed to push our emotional buttons. "The whole panoply and soundscape of everyday life," Gitlin writes, "are compensation, tranquilizer, partial transcendence -- a realm of felt freedom and pleasure."

But "Media Unlimited" is not a rant against big corporations forcing themselves on the lowly consumer, although Gitlin, a former '60s leftist, does occasionally sample that tune.

"The easy part is to point the finger at the attention-getting industries," he says. "But it's an evasion of responsibility. These are not extraterrestrial forces that descended upon us." In the book, he points out the extent to which we tote the media torrent with us, with our Internet-accessing personal digital assistants, cellphones, laptop computers,

Discmans and portable TVs. Providers are feeding a demand from consumers.

And although he doesn't paraphrase Walt Kelly's famous aphorism from Pogo, it seems appropriate as a way of summing up his point: We have met the media, and they are us.

"I do think the media-saturated life is something of a travesty of human existence, and something of a defeat of the values we claim to cherish," Gitlin says.

"It's not as if we're unaware there's something very peculiar about this way of life. We need to engage all of our senses, not just those that are easily triggered. There is a spiritual imperative to deepening life and feeling feelings that are not disposable. Whatever you want to do about it, at least do it consciously."

Phil Kloer writes about popular culture for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.