"The media saturates, drenches, overflows our lives: an endless torrent of words, images, sounds. This is not the "information age", a mere channel to life, says openDemocracy's North Americas editor, but life itself. How do people make sense of the onrush without being submerged by it?"
Well, how do they? Todd Gitlin (for it is he) begins to address the texture of media saturation, the essence of its omnipresence ... but ultimately stops short of concluding, well, much at all. Perhaps he's too busy promoting his upcoming book, 'Media Unlimited: How The Torrent Of Images And Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives' - who says Americans have no sense of irony? ;) There's little here that Steven Johnson hasn't already dealt with, but there is some good stuff. His idea of unity could be useful - to see media as one (in)coherent universe, rather than trying to separate out different channels within the media, and further separate those from 'real life', whatever that is ... as well as noting the sensorial nature of all this experience:
"Through all the confusion we sense something like a unity at work. The torrent is seamless: a collage of back-to-back stories, talk-show banter, fragments of ads, soundtracks of musical snippets. Even as we click around, something feels uniform - a relentless pace, a pattern of interruption, a seriousness about unseriousness, a readiness for sensation, an anticipation of the next new thing. Whatever the diversity of texts, the media largely share a texture, even if it is maddeningly difficult to describe - real and unreal, present and absent, disposable and essential, distracting and absorbing, sensational and tedious, emotional and numbing."
[at OpenDemocracy]
