Redeeming Modernity
Contradictions in Media Criticism
1st Edition
Published on 5. September 1990
Book
Hardback
224 pages
978-0-8039-3476-4 (ISBN)
Description
This book examines the explicit and implicit logic operating in claims of media influence. Beginning with a close analysis of arguments by four critical voices - Dwight Macdonald, Daniel Boorstin, Stuart Ewen and Neil Postman - on the nature of media influence, the author demonstrates how they mobilize three dominant metaphors - media as information, media as art, and media as education. She then examines the historical and intellectual roots of these concepts in American social and cultural thought and explores media as a new technology as a means for more positive expectations of media influence. The book closes with a section considering how debates on postmodernism redirect but do not resolve the basic contradictions in social and cultural thought.
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Content
PART ONE: FOUR CRITICAL VOICES
Dwight Macdonald
The Media as Mass Culture
Daniel Boorstin
The Media as Spectacular Illusion
Stuart Ewen
The Media as Ideological Apparatus
Neil Postman
The Media as Corrosive Amusement
Macdonald, Boorstin, Ewen, Postman
What the Media Do
PART TWO: MEDIA IN MODERNITY
The Possibility of Progress
The Modernity Story
The Duality of Modernity
The Modern as Mass Society
American Modernity
Media
Modernity as Inauthentic Other
Polluting the Future
The World of Tomorrow
Media as New Technologies
Media as Technological Progress
PART THREE: THREE DOMINANT METAPHORS
The Media as Art
The Media as Information
The Media as Education
Conclusions
PART FOUR: CHARACTERISTICS OF MEDIA DISCOURSE
Essential Worth
Lowest Common Denominator?
Egalitarian Elitism
The Contamination Theme
Blurring Boundaries
The Pure and the Polluting
Media Minglings
Corruption and Deflection
PART FIVE: RECOGNITION AND RECONCEPTUALIZATIONS
Media Power
Redemptive Forms
Historical Trajectories
Immanence as Transcendence
Consequences of Reconceptualization
Recognizing the Dream
Dwight Macdonald
The Media as Mass Culture
Daniel Boorstin
The Media as Spectacular Illusion
Stuart Ewen
The Media as Ideological Apparatus
Neil Postman
The Media as Corrosive Amusement
Macdonald, Boorstin, Ewen, Postman
What the Media Do
PART TWO: MEDIA IN MODERNITY
The Possibility of Progress
The Modernity Story
The Duality of Modernity
The Modern as Mass Society
American Modernity
Media
Modernity as Inauthentic Other
Polluting the Future
The World of Tomorrow
Media as New Technologies
Media as Technological Progress
PART THREE: THREE DOMINANT METAPHORS
The Media as Art
The Media as Information
The Media as Education
Conclusions
PART FOUR: CHARACTERISTICS OF MEDIA DISCOURSE
Essential Worth
Lowest Common Denominator?
Egalitarian Elitism
The Contamination Theme
Blurring Boundaries
The Pure and the Polluting
Media Minglings
Corruption and Deflection
PART FIVE: RECOGNITION AND RECONCEPTUALIZATIONS
Media Power
Redemptive Forms
Historical Trajectories
Immanence as Transcendence
Consequences of Reconceptualization
Recognizing the Dream