BOOK REVIEW
Gitlin's 'Unlimited' examines life in a world of media glut 

By Jerry Ackerman, Globe Correspondent, 5/24/2002 

Maybe you are listening to the radio while reading this. Maybe there's a television on nearby or you are killing time waiting for your e-mail to download. (Or maybe you are among the many people who ''watch'' TV, scan the newspaper headlines, and go on the Internet all at the same time. No kidding.) As for me, I began reading Todd Gitlin's ''Media Unlimited'' at an airport, and there are few better places to drive home his point that our lives indeed are awash in auditory and visual clutter. 

While flight departure announcements blared from one overhead speaker, CNN droned from another; the gate area was flanked by neon-lighted storefronts hawking snacks, books, and trinkets to take home; and, of course, cellphones were buzzing everywhere. As Gitlin puts it, the swirl of sounds and images that surrounds us almost every minute of the day has ceased to be ''an accompaniment to life'' and become ''a central experience of life.'' This isn't exactly news, of course, except to the occasional hermit or cloistered monk. 

What Gitlin's book adds is perspective on why this has come to be and some thoughts about why we put up with it. The short answer, covering both points, is that in a world where most work and home life can be pretty humdrum, satisfaction has taken a high priority in our personal lives. Just in time, we also came into an age where technology can help feed and nourish us when we are feeling ennui. In addition to print and all its manifestations, from magazines for any taste to T-shirt logos to ads wrapped around buses and taxis or projected with spotlights on public sidewalks, the list rolls on: ubiquitous radios, remote-accessible answering machines, fax machines, cellphones, laptop computers, portable tape and CD players, beepers, Palm Pilots, the Internet, PCDs, and GPDs. 

The result is that entertainments that had been once-in-a-lifetime experiences and within reach of only the rich are now considered entitlements, ever available to massage us through our boredom. Where a theater ticket 200 years ago cost roughly a day's pay for an average laborer, the cost today of watching a cable-TV show at home can be calculated in pennies. Don't cast all the blame on Disney or AOL Time Warner or Sony. The list of culprits begins before the Middle Ages with wandering storytellers and minstrels. And if technology is to be held at fault, one might as well start with Gutenberg's movable type, which made spreading the printed word possible, and at lower cost than ever imagined. We have only ourselves to blame for buying what's being sold, but the avalanche we've helped create, in turn, has only further increased our expectations. ''Raised in the media torrent, most of us have come to expect - demand - nothing less than its bounty,'' says Gitlin. ''Most people, most of the time, experience media as signs of society's generosity. The profusion of images offers fun, stimulus, feeling, or a sense of connection, however fugitive. We feel flattered to have the access.'' 

And as any newspaper reader knows, trying to meet those expectations is big business. Entertainment, providing content for all this technology to deliver, is roughly an $80 billion industry. Philosophers, novelists, and songwriters get a turn as Gitlin makes his case; Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, and Julia Roberts have their day. Gitlin acknowledges that his recitations of history can be tangled. But he also pulls nodding-off readers back with one-liners (''The melange is the message'') and lists of ever more outrageous forms of media that engulf us - such as ads in toilet stalls or posted above urinals. Gitlin, a New York University journalism professor, despairs that democracy has benefited little from the flood of information and entertainment that swamps our lives.

 True, the media can mobilize populations when big issues arise. Witness the buzz around water coolers and in supermarket aisles provoked by the O. J. Simpson murder trial and Bill Clinton's White House peccadilloes, as well as the massive contributions to charity and wholehearted political support that followed the attacks of Sept. 11. In general, the torrent of information has reduced civics to a sideshow, as marketers go for our emotional jugular by hyping private lives and devaluing public affairs. 

Participation in elections is at an all-time low. Gitlin holds little hope for any real reversal. Indeed, he writes, ''if the argument of my book is even approximately true, unlimited media are exactly what an urban-based, industrial society with a money economy and a division of labor requires.'' So how do we survive the onslaught? Easy question. In spite of mass media's best efforts, we're not brain-dead. ''Everyone learns not only to see, but not to see - to tune out and turn away,'' Gitlin notes. ''

We all learn to play favorites (and least favorites). What choice do we have?'' 

Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives, by Todd Gitlin (Metropolitan Books, 288 pp., $25) 

This story ran on page D2 of the Boston Globe on 5/24/2002. © Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.