Todd Gitlin
Todd Gitlin
Todd Gitlinis an American sociologist, political writer, novelist, and cultural commentator. He has written widely on the mass media, politics, intellectual life and the arts, for both popular and scholarly publications...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionSociologist
CountryUnited States of America
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You're in the news business and you're in the business of arresting the attention of people and prying them away from what they take for granted. They must read the next day's paper and so on. While the desire to gain attention is a dynamic in journalism, it's not the only one. The predominant dynamic since journalism's inception has been the desire to capture the attention of people. Another dynamic is the extension of democratic enlightenment.
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Can't address the big fact that the bulk of life is taking place under the pressure of an onslaught of images.
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Again, the only trends that interest the corporate boys and girls are demographic and businesslike. I doubt the think tank reports interest them much.
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People who feel that their ways of life are threatened or feel generally anxious or confused about the way things are going are disposed to look for causes.
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I have no action plan, and as a writer I don't want to get hung up on the advantages and disadvantages of particular strategies.
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My book is focused on the power of the American state, not least because the government of the United States governs so much that the case could be made that everybody around the world ought to have a vote in determining some of its policies.
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My business is the analytical framework.
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Mills insisted that a sociologist's proper subject was the intersection of biography and history.
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Right now, we have no possibility of politics because we have a one-party state.
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All I will say is that there are particular features of the American constitutional system that renders a third party futile - at best.
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Americas are, for a variety of reasons, the most adept at producing the kind of entertainment that delivers easy satisfactions.
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I don't for the life of me understand how anybody could contemplate the results of the 2000 election in the US and say that electoral politics doesn't matter any more, and that Ralph Nader was right when he said there is no difference between the two parties.
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The manufacture of desire isn't at the heart - if it isn't absurd to speak of a heart - of the media torrent. Chronic dissatisfaction is at the heart of the matter.
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As I write at the end, if we step back and face the enormity of the torrent, then we have taken the first step to imagining what we might want to do about it.