Addicted to Distraction: Psychological Consequences of the Modern Mass Media - Couverture souple

Charlton, Bruce

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1908684410 ISBN 13 : 9781908684417

Editeur : The University of Buckingham Press, 2014

Synopsis

The Media just grows and grows, and progressively takes-over control of all the functionally useful social systems from politics to religion, from education to the arts.Yet the Mass Media is a system like no other it has no function of its own, so it can just keep growing. It has no positive aim for society, and regards all knowledge just a matter of opinion. Therefore the Mass Media subverts all that is useful, and everything that gives meaning and purpose to life.Since the Media works like a drug, the first step is withdrawal, and a 'detox' program. Having escaped addiction, we may become free of the lies and lunacies of life in the Media bubble, and return to the realities of direct personal knowledge, actual experience and common sense."

A propos du livre

Revue de presse

In this groundbreaking study, Bruce Charlton sheds brilliant light on fundamental features of our current situation. He develops Marshall McLuhan's insight that "the medium is the message" into a deeply illuminating account of the mass media as a self-sustaining techno-cultural system that absorbs the whole of human life into a virtual world of willfulness and unreality. Like Plato in his Myth of the Cave, he calls for each of us to turn away from flickering images and toward realities. We need to heed that call. --James Kalb: author of The Tyranny of Liberalism and Against Inclusiveness

Addicted to Distraction by Bruce G Charlton is a brilliant, pithy, and incisive analysis and condemnation of the modern mass media and its semipurposeful agenda of permanent revolution, permanent hysteria, and permanent chaos. His comments are as cutting as the scalpel of a surgeon performing an autopsy, and his insights a bright and clear as the merciless lights in an operating theater. Can a fish drown? Can it even notice the waters in which it lives and moves? No more than can we notice the totalitarian relativism of the modern mass media. The Mass Media is a roaring, grinding attention-grabbing machine which operates with no set purpose; except the purpose to subvert, uncreate, mock and destroy. It does not matter what the media destroys. Pointless subversion is the point of the media, and the medium is the message. By all means read and understand this book ... and then go out by yourself into the calm and silent wilderness for a year. --John C Wright, author and Nebula Award finalist

Présentation de l'éditeur

For most of us the Mass Media is the focus of our lives - it provides the material which is discussed and debated, it articulates our responses, and it provides the framework by which a vast potential volume of material is filtered, prioritized and interpreted. Headlines and sound-bites vie arbitrarily for our attention: famine relief in an African country, the sacking of a celebrity; honouring a sports hero; a Royal Wedding; the wonders of a new computer, a tax on 'carbon'; the trial or indeed knighthood of a sexual offender... With the pace of its growth and advances of technology, the Mass Media affects us by its system properties that is by its attention-grabbing ability, its addictiveness, its pervasiveness; its whole way of evaluating and presenting stimuli to which we become first assimilated, then addicted. The reality is that anything can be treated as overwhelmingly important, urgent, desperate, demanding of action now, but as easily forgotten. The medium has outgrown the message. The overall fact of this massive communications system has become more important than the details of its communications. Stimulated by the horrific revelations of the Jimmy Savile affair at the BBC, with its implications of wholesale Establishment corruption and a sustained Media cover-up; this book diagnoses the fundamental problem of the modern world as addiction to the distractions of the Mass Media and points to the only logical end-point for its expansion: the destruction of society itself.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: The University of Buckingham Press
• Date d'édition: 2014
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1908684410
• ISBN 13: 9781908684417
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 164
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible