In ranging from video games to elevator music, action movies to reality shows, punditry to Internet exhibitionists, Todd Gitlin's new book "Media Unlimited" evokes a world of relentless sensation and nonstop stimulus. Far from signaling a "new information age" or a rescue from passivity, Gitlin reveals the glut of manufactured images and sounds as one of the defining features of our civilization and as a perverse culmination of Western hopes for freedom.

In the excerpt below, Gitlin addresses "The Paranoid," that is, the person who "displaces justifiable fears of actual dangers" with fantasy. Indeed, the philosopher Stanley Cavell, one of the authorities cited by Gitlin, states that the fear of television "is a fear displaced from the world onto its monitor." Overwhelmed by the torrent of images and sounds in today's media, the paranoid — who may be any of us, Gitlin implies — has lost the ability to make intelligible connections among them.

— Andrew Levy (Andrew@mediachannel.org), Editor
 

The Paranoid
Criticism easily shades into paranoia. There is a continuum. Somewhere at the far edge of the commonplace that images matter is the folk mystique that They are programming Us — that television (the usual culprit) is an addiction, a hypnotic agent, a cause of hyperactivity, or worse. There is also the notion that television in particular — the 'idiot box', the 'boob tube' — is an all-around agent of stupefaction, a pacifier that turns us into infants, paralyzing analytical faculties, dumbing us down, reducing us to couch-potatohood, pathetically basking in our weakened condition. In the brave new world of amusements projected by Aldous Huxley in 1932, a dystopia renewed by Ray Bradbury in "Fahrenheit 451" (1953) and frequently since then, television is 'soma', the perfect drug — one that, like heroin, as William Burroughs once wrote, makes the consumer come to it. From this point of view, the fact that 'idiot box' and 'boob tube' have fallen away as terms of abuse, and 'couch potato' and 'vegging out' have grown into terms of ironic affection, measures television's success.

Versions of the so-called hypodermic hypothesis cropped up around World War I, when many people came to believe that a wave of anti-German propaganda in the press had driven the United States to intervene in that war and that Lenin's mastery of propaganda explained the Bolshevik Revolution. Propaganda was also the target of Marxists, who thought bourgeois media were designed to spread and reinforce values conducive to the health of capitalism and inimical to its enemies. Varieties of hypodermic theory were the starting point of modern media research, further elaborated by refugee intellectuals — most influentially T. W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School, in their 1944 essay "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception," later recycled in Herbert Marcuse's influential 1964 book, "One-Dimensional Man." In the early days of television, a variant of this view entered the mainstream of American sociology, with Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton pointing fingers at television's "narcotizing dysfunction." Of course, these dystopian hypotheses would not have flourished without a history of monstrous propagandists in power, as witness Hitler and Stalin, vindicating the view of the power of propaganda popularized in George Orwell's "1984."

The paranoia of the Frankfurt School was brilliant and elaborate, motivated as it was by a plausible (though exaggerated) sense of political catastrophe in Europe and the intellectual disgrace of American culture. It became corrupted and caricatured in later, more simpleminded versions — in effect, propagandistic assaults on propaganda. Consider the vogue for Wilson Bryan Key, an itinerant journalism professor who, in two books published in the 1970s, "Subliminal Seduction" and "Media Sexploitation," maintained that media images were loaded with subliminal messages. The mass-market paperback cover of "Media Sexploitation" left nothing to the imagination: "YOU ARE BEING SEXUALLY MANIPULATED AT THIS VERY MOMENT. DO YOU KNOW HOW? ... THE HIDDEN IMPLANTS IN AMERICA'S MASS MEDIA — AND HOW THEY PROGRAM AND CONDITION YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS MIND." Key purported to find the letters S, E, X engraved on jars in Vaseline ads, superimposed on ice cubes in liquor ads, embedded in campaign literature ("If you relax under a good light, the very lightly etched letters are easily apparent"), even inscribed in newspaper photos of American helicopters in Vietnam. To Key, Simon and Garfunkel's "Bridge over Troubled Water" was a song about a drug trip, complete with hypodermic syringe ("Sail on, silver girl"). Everywhere, popular culture had jammed poisoned needles under delicate American skin.

The paranoid belief that We are being drugged, mesmerized, or programmed by Them is one of the abiding fears of our time. Key's hypersensitive cryptography was a sort of crackpot successor to Vance Packard's best-selling "The Hidden Persuaders" (1957), which attributed considerable powers to a "motivational researcher" named Ernest Dichter who specialized in telling automobile and other consumer-goods companies how to appeal to crass (usually sexual) fantasies. Key anticipated such reveries as the 1968 fantasy that if you played the Beatles' "I'm So Tired" backward you would hear the words 'Paul is dead', and a Christian fundamentalist belief that Procter and Gamble's star-and-moon logo was the sign of the devil.

The paranoid is a negative monotheist. With the gift of paranoia, the mind spies out the agents of darkness, seeing through the big lie to the big truth that bamboozled creatures are blind to. Paranoia mobilizes not only shared ideology but emotions — terror along with smugness, pity for the naive. When the primary sources of insecurity are natural, the most prevalent forms of paranoia concern inhuman forces. Astrology blames the stars; Manichaean religion, the devil. In contemporary society, on the other hand, individualism is supposed to guarantee autonomy. If we are still at a loss, drifting or suffering, it must be because They — the Government, the Liberal Media, the Media Monopoly, the Zionist Occupation Government (ZOG) — are pushing the buttons. Paranoia is alienated magic. No wonder the torrent itself loves paranoia — a plot device that requires no special introduction, invoking audience sentiments as familiar as any. Post-Vietnam, there is scarcely an action film where the government does not harbor a sinister conspiracy to cover up the truth, where the hero is not subject to surveillance, where ostensibly good guys do not turn out to be bad. In "The X-Files," government agencies not only are riddled with spies, soldiers of fortune, and good cops gone bad but are literally at the service of aliens.

In its extremity, paranoia is a warped version of legitimate fear. It can be argued, for example, that the indiscriminate fear of television in particular displaces justifiable fears of actual dangers — dangers of which television, in its most realistic mode, for all its shortfalls, provides some disturbing glimpses. The philosopher Stanley Cavell has proposed that "the fear of television ... is the fear that what it monitors is the growing inhabitability of the world, the irreversible pollution of the earth, a fear displaced from the world onto its monitor." In other words, we fear and loathe television the way people who feel ugly fear and loathe mirrors. In a reformist spirit, Cavell proposes that better television could be an instrument of collective enlightenment: "if the monitor picked up on better talk, and probed for intelligible connections and for beauty among its events, it might alleviate our paralysis ... sufficiently to help us allow ourselves to do something intelligent about its cause."

Yet fright in the face of the media Medusa with a million glassy tentacles misses something essential about contemporary experience. Raised in the media torrent, most of us have come to expect — demand — nothing less than its bounty. This plenitude compensates for something we would otherwise lack. 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.

While others welcome the nonstop gift of images, the paranoid refuses to feel flattered. This refusal is admirable. But the soft dystopia of the torrent rolls on nevertheless.

— Todd Gitlin is a professor of culture, journalism, and sociology at New York University and the author of eight previous notable books, including "Inside Prime Time", "The Sixties", and "The Twilight of Common Dreams." He lives in New York City.

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