Last refreshed at 0600GMT Friday The best five books on everything | 30 July 2010

Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms our Lives

Todd Gitlin
Image of Media Unlimited, Revised Edition: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives

My book looks at the media torrent as a huge social phenomenon in itself, namely that what people spend most of their time doing in our civilization is connecting to media. We have more experience of people via electronics than we have of face-to-face contact. I don’t view this with automatic alarm, or as an occasion for fireworks – there are elements that are beneficial, there are elements that are sort of horrific. I can’t pretend to have a particular line on it, except saying, “There it is, we’d better stare at it.”