While reading Media Unlimited, my eyes were opened to the amount of power audio and visual information has on our culture. I was not as aware as I thought I was about how much the media affects our daily lives. What is scarier is the fact that so many of us do not even realize how we are sucked into the Internet, television, technological devices, music, movies, and advertisements. Gitlin shows how over years of civilization we have gotten to this point. He starts off discussing a Vermeer painting in a Dutch house and tells us that many people during this era only had paintings as their visual medium. He says that many people would collect and display these paintings and place them in the front rooms of their houses. Gitlin shows how over time that small amount of imagery and general media grew and expanded as a result of the growing art market, the production of books, religion/religious imagery, newspapers, film production and more. All of this would not have been possible without the development of technology and the desire to escape from the reality of our world.
What is the most eye opening are the results of the surveys taken to decipher how much television the average person watches on a daily basis. I had been aware that the number of hours was between 5 and 6per day. But what Gitlin rought to my attention was the fact that these statistics do not account for how much time the television is on in the background, nor does it account for televisions on airplanes, buses, building fronts in times square, etc. He also brought to my attention the amount of T.V.s per household. He says that "of American children 8-18, 65% have a TV in their bedrooms, 86% a radio. 42% of all American households with children have the TV on "most of the time" according to survey responses." We as a society have become completely absorbed by the media and technology to the point where, as Gitlin says, it has become part of nature.
Gitlin makes many interesting points when he is discussing what it is that we watch on television. He says that all the characters become real to us. We are disillusioned by what we see on T.V. and are able to be brought into an alternate world without any awareness of the hold that it has on us. He talks about how so many people forget that the characters on these shows do not really exist. He proves this by telling of a woman who wrote to a certain actress and asked her why she broke up with her boyfriend on the show. This shows how the media has created such a false reality that so many people fall victim to. Gitlin says that we become so involved in these characters and scenarios for a number of reasons. He says that we feed on drama and desire distraction from our own lives. He also says that we are interested in knowing what it is like to be in certain situations other than our own, such as working in the ER. Gitlin proves his point with many statistics. Another fact that I found shocking was when he discussed the ratio of television use to the lack of voting. He says, "According to surveys from 1994 and 1995, the more television people said they watched, the less likely they were to be registered to vote. ... The additional hour a day Americans on average spent in front of the TV in 1995 as compared to 1965 might account, by itself, for "perhaps one-quarter of the entire drop in civil engagement.'"
Gitlin has caused me to be even more aware of the amount of visual/audio media that envelops our society today and the grasp it has on us. I believe that because of the inability to decipher between the real and the self-generated will put us in more danger over time.
