This book is quite insightful, especially for a Southeast Asian media professional like myself. I recommend this book to everyone, even to those who work in the upper regions of the power sturcture of the media conglomerates critiqued in the collection.

For starters, it is a wonderful overview of how the media economy is shifting all over the world. The US market is saturated, as the book said, and the rest of the world is ripe for picking, especially my country, the Philippines.

This book is a tool to launch our own media analysis of what's happenning in our own countries. And from an analysis, we launch a critique, and from a critique, we launch steps to face the situation.

This book, published by New Media, is invaluable. I first read about it in an issue of Utne Reader. I took down the title and hunted it down in Amazon. I found it, bought it, and consumed it. I loved it because it gave me useful insights to work with.

This is a book I will dog-ear in my attempts to understand what to do in my field, and how to start my own media conglomerate from scratch. I already have my ideas, which I hope aren't just soundbites in my head.

The first chapter of this book is "The Promise" and in it Mills takes his stand with the great tradition of the Enlightenment and the idea of liberation by learning. For Mills, the promise is that cultivation of the sociological imagination may enable people to place personal worries and concerns in the larger social and historical context, and thus to think more effectively about them.

Chapters on Grand Theory and Abstracted Empiricism show how the understanding of social processes is impeded by immersion in certain types of theory and in narrow-minded "nomal science". Other chapters explore the many and varied ways that the critical and probing "sociological imagination" can be subverted or frustrated. His description of the Machieavellian tactics employed by academics to sideline rivals is especially revealing (for example, have a potentially dangerous book reviewed by a junior member of a hostile faction). His comments on the function of professional associations and conferences are equally deadly.

The main failing of the book arises from the author's theoretical and ideological stance which is not explicitly articulated but was clearly in the rational and humanistic Marixist tradition. He yearned for a viable alternative to liberalism and Marxism as he saw them in the 1950s but he clearly did not perceive classical liberalism as a candidate that was worthy of mention. It seems that classical, non-socialist liberals were so thin on the ground during his lifetime that he did not see any need to engage with them. That is a major weakness and it prevented Mills, and this book, from reaching the full extent of insight and understanding that his scholarship, his integrity and his industry should have permitted.

The best part of a very good book is the Appendix on Intellectual Craftmanship and this the kind of thing that is worth reading every few years to keep focussed for effective reading, thinking and writing. The remainder of this review consists of extracts from the appendix to convey some of its flavour.

"It is best to begin, I think, by reminding you, the beginning student, that the most admirable thinkers within the scholarly community you have chosen to join do not split their work from their lives.They seem to take both too seriously to allow such dissociation, and they want to use each for the enrichment of the other."

"You must set up a file, which is, I suppose, a sociologist's way of saying: keep a journal...In such a file as I am going to describe, there is joined personal experience and professional activities, studies under way and studies planned..."

"One of the very worst things that happens to social scientists is that they feel the need to write of their 'plans' on only one occasion: when they are going to ask for money for a specific piece of research or 'a project'. It is as a request for funds that most 'planning' is done, or at least written carefully about. However standard the practice, I think this very bad: it is bound in some degree to be salesmanship, and, given prevailing expectations, very likely to result in painstaking pretensions; the project is lilely to be presented', rounded out in some arbitrary manner long before it ought to be; it is often a contrived thing, aimed at getting the money for ulterior purposes, however valuable, as well as for the research presented."

"Any working social scientist who is well on his way ought at all times to have so many plans, that is to say ideas, that the question is always, which of them am I, ought I, to work on next. And he should keep a special file for his master agenda, which he writes and rewrites just for himself and perhaps for discussion with friends. From time to time he ought to review this very carefully and purposefully, and sometimes too, when he is relaxed."

"Any such procedure is one of the indispensable means by which your intellectual enterprise is kept oriented and under control...In [a vigorous and free intellectual community]...there would be interludes of discussion among individuals about future work. Three kinds of interludes - on problems, methods, theory - ought to come out of the work of social scientists and lead into it again: they should be shaped by work-in-progress and to some extend guide their work. It is for such interludes that a professional association finds its intellectual reason for being."

He saw two major trends that removed the social sciences from addressing robust problems whose solution would make genuine differences to humanity. The first was a retreat into 'Theory' so abstract that it was unable to describe anything of significance. Wright uses as an example an article that describes a theory of human relationships that was so abstracted from reality that, as Wright shows, it could not capture the fact that sometimes people accept the norms of their society unwillingly. This theory was wrapped in such opaque jargon to unambiguously define the trivial that it last all relationship to genuine society.

Wright also identifies as a further development in the social sciences, an empiricism so constrained by technique that it can only address the most specific and mundane problem. If theory has become to remote and abstract to contact real society this empiricism is equivalent in being so immersed in the specifics of a society that it cannot capture more than the trivial.

Wright's book is a plea to social scientists to abandon these two enterprises and to return to a social science which is concerned with problems whose solutions will change society,. He calls the ability to find and understand such problems the sociological imagination. He sees practitioners of this form of sociology as inherently political. They may not be in political office but they make their findings known to be acted upon in the political milieu.

Wright sees this as a way to genuine freedom in that the governed will know the structure of the society that is governing them and can then freely choose to live within it or to make changes. Wright is concerned that the social sciences of his time were not used to promote this genuine understanding of society by the population but to manipulate them into a passive acceptance of norms that may not be in their interest. He is afraid of a beneficent tyranny with a population of what he calls happy robots.

This book is a denunciation of passive acquiescence and a plea for informed acceptance as the basis of society. Wright's fears are as valid today as when he wrote them over 40 years ago.

Now, many years later, I have just finished re-reading the book and am now convinced why this is a classic in the literature of the Social Sciences. Mills in this book seeks to advocate a certain ideal in the discipline of sociology. Known as the sociological imagination, he advocates the idea of using sociology to bear on the unease which man(in a generic sense!) faces in his daily life. Mills is arguing that much of unease felt by the individual has social roots, i.e., it is shared by many others. The cause of such unease has to do with the structure of society and changes that is happening in it. Hence, there is a great need for sociologists (and other social scientists) to articulate how such unease has sociological causes and thus enabling the individual to understand how his biography intersects with the structure and history of his society. In this way, hopefully it will empower to individuals to transform such unease into public issues in order to bring about changes in society.

Overall, this work is intelligently written as well as being morally challenging.Sure, much has changed since the first publication of this book but it is a good place to start for those who wants to find out what is sociology and to those who wants to be reacquainted with the ideals of sociology.

It is a morally challenging work which needs to be read and re-read time and again!

In "The Whole World is Watching," Gitlin argues that the theory of hegemony as articulated by Antonio Gramsci can be applied to the media and its operations. Gitlin argues that the media is a tool of the corporate liberal apparatus and that the media acts as a sort of "middle-man" between elites and the masses. The media controls and directs how people think by using "frames." These frames limit the parameters in which discourse can take place in the public sphere. Frames can and do change, however, as elites change their opinions. Gitlin uses SDS as a test case for his theory. He argues that SDS, once it came to media attention in 1965, was framed by the media as an anti-war group, totally ignoring all of the other things SDS stood for (participatory democracy, etc.). This frame attracted thousands of people who joined SDS without any knowledge of what SDS was all about. This influx of people ended up changing the group for the worse, and SDS died a painful death several years later due to sectarian Marxist wackos.

Along the way, Gitlin looks at various other traits of the media. For me, the most important was his examination of how media creates celebrity. This treatment is particularly important in relation to SDS because it contributed to its downfall. Gitlin shows how SDS's schizophrenic attitudes toward leadership (where organization was needed and advocated by some but opposed by those who hated hierarchy) allowed the media to create harmful divisions. The media tends to profile only the people who are photogenic or those who make good copy. Unfortunately for SDS, these were usually not the best qualified or most stable people. Those that got the attention parlayed their success into monetary gains, alienating other people in the organization. Mark Rudd comes to mind as one who best personifies this problem. Rudd, who sported a comb over that would make Senator Carl Levin jealous, went on to fame and glory with the Weatherman organization. His claims to media celebrity went so deep that when he turned himself in to the authorities in 1977, reporters turned out in droves for what turned out to be a non-event. What is important here is that the media concentrate on image over substance. This can be very harmful to an organization with serious issues to debate.

Gitlin ends his dissertation with a critique of the sources he used for his research. Gitlin was only able to peruse the CBS archives, as ABC didn't have any and NBC wouldn't let him look at theirs. The other main media source for the dissertation was the New York Times. Despite the limited scope of his sources, I think Gitlin has gone a long way towards exposing the hypocrisy any right thinking person knows exists in our media systems. Gitlin even goes so far as to imply that the 1968 Democratic Convention fiasco in Chicago was a media creation. For anyone interested in media studies, this book is a must have.

The Whole World is Watching is an indepth and scholarly look at how the media portrayed left-leaning student protest in New York and Washington in the 1960s. The words that the New York Times used to describe the protests were as important as the amount of ink they received. Gitlin demonstrates how the coverage the student protests received in the mainstream media determined how the general public perceived their cause.

Gitlin is an excellent writer and The Whole World is Watching is highly researched and well executed.

I thought "Media Unlimited" was fascinating at times (as all his books are), but it failed to deliver on the promises of the introduction. After saying that "the medium is the message" means almost nothing, the next 200 pages go on to explain in great detail how the torrent of media is, in the McLuhan sense, the message. It's not what is being said but how it is constantly washing over us that's important. Nothing new here.

His explanation of the word "speed" is fascinating, as is his hypothesis that the media torrent dictates a tendancy toward conservative values (an idea Chomsky kicked around years ago with his realization that in the television medium he must sound like he's from Neptune). There are gold coins to be found if the reader persists. Perhaps you'll love it if you skip the intro.

PS--If you're curious about why we're reading and writing these reviews as though they matter, pick up Gitlin's book. Great material on exactly this topic.

Any time a film is released which is a commentary on the mass media--offhand I think of "Mad City," "Wag the Dog," or even "15 Minutes"--I get to a theatre to see it. I fancy myself as a media commentator, though I don't claim to do so with any scholarly expertise.

The title of this volume caught my eye because it stresses not the traditional media boogie men, corporate power, mediocrity, and on and on. He points out at the beginning of the text that these ARE issues, but they're not the point of the text. The point is that we are inundated with messages. We here/see/feel everything from Muzak to radios, to cell phone conversations we want nothing to do with. We cannot avoid it.

To be perfectly honest, I was expecting something more "scholarly" from Gitlin. You know, the pages of footnotes and all the trappings that something has been "studied" and that others of equivalent-or-better expertise have said the same thing several times. I found this text, though, to be more of an oped page commentary. And there's something relieving about that. First, I guess some of the academic stuff can be dry, even if it affirms what you want to believe. Gitlin was quite witty through the text, and I found that he makes statements similar to ones I've been making for years, and that feels good.

Frankly, with almost everything he said I agreed. As just one example, "activists" tend to blow the importance of the Internet, particularly e-mail, way out of proportion. It seems that every time a new medium comes about, such activists say that the new medium is the answer. Now the people will see the world OUR way and the mighty transformation will take place. But, Gitlin points out, white supremacists and other less-than-desirables have access to the same new media! And the former "new" media are now commercial extravaganzas.

And his comments on our obsession with cell phones--instant and constant communication--are gems. (I suppose I'll have to e-mail them to a number of my allies?)

I am also amused--and have commented the same myself--that so many of the "progressive" groups that decry corporations have their own brands and logos, following the corporate lead in defining their identities. That's one of today's more amusing paradoxes.

And he points out in a few places that we tend to either blame, or accredit the media too much. There are, he points out, bigger social forces than merely corporate greed or media obsession that drive us. So to make either a saint or a demon of "the media" (a word sometimes used as a singular and sometimes as a plural) is erroneous.

The influence of this message inundation may have, he suggests, a detrimental effect on what we know as "democracy."

Indeed, Gitlin dedicates one chapter to speed, something I've noticed obsesses us these days. When we're not buying a new computer every six months because the last one isn't fast enough, we're spending $40 a more on DSL because the Internet is no longer giving us our e-mail fast enough. The rest of the world is just a bunch of snails, huh?

That, I guess leads to my challenge to the text: I'm not sure where the speed relates to the media. Again, while I appreciate, and solidly agree with most of what Gitlin has to say, I'm not sure that it all relates to "the media," or whether they're part of a bigger condition--or problem--with the society. Then his last chapter on the Disney empire, seemed to be changing the subject.

So, maybe the title should be different. Or maybe the book should have been published as a series of essays.

Overall I do not discourage one from reading the book. It's one of the few that I finished, then reviewed it, going over everything I'd highlighted (some of which I found to be so valuable that I WILL e-mail to friends.) But it doesn't seem to fit together as one topic as much as I hoped it would.

I hope to read someday more analyses of what's going on in Western society now, its obsession with--yes--speed and the like. This text confirmed what I already believe but didn't give me many new ideas. For those new ideas I'll still be looking.

It seems that Todd Gitlin once again has released a book written without bombast, without alarm. There are no sirens in it. There are no skies falling. The book presents a new way of thinking about our new way of living. If we aren't "Amusing Ourselves to Death," then we are only amusing ourselves to fleeting passions. And the costs are therefore subtle, hard to measure, and potentially debilitating in unexpected ways.

Media Unlimited takes a reasoned, complex look at the phenomena of torrential media and presents it all in a fresh and lucid way. The book makes us consider the ways in which we swim among images and sounds, the ways we construct our desires and interests in response to what Gitlin argues is a major shift in the experience of being human after the 20th century.

Gitlin's reading of media flows is -- dare I say -- hip. When he writes about hackers or Eminem, I don't get the feeling that he has only read about them in the Times.

I appreciate that the book is respectful of fandom, aware of the value of passions (even fleeting, meta, hyper-mediated passions ... this morning I found myself nostalgically singing along with a song from my college days, ABC's "When Smokey Sings," an homage to Smokey Robinson, when the video came on VH1 Classic ... that's passion thrice removed), and willing to grant acknowledgement to potential progressive influence where it's due.

I hope the book catches a wave. Gitlin was able to place the book in the context of the terrorst attacks in September 2001. So the book seems very fresh. Yet I expect it has legs as well.

As a liberal, Gitlin's views are clear. While I am more conservative than he, I empathise with where he was coming from. For me, as a high school student, the 60s were the ideal carnival: why not ditch school to protest war? I feared being drafted, escaped it by a nose when the war ended, and wanted to relive this from a different pint of view. It wasn't available in this book.

Recommended, but not great.

To his credit, Riesman bends over backwards to say that people can belong to all categories at once through various manifestations of their characters. Nevertheless, the categories are so simple, and feel so descriptively true, that the tendency to believe in the categories and Riesman's historical sketch of how each comes about almost our overwhelms skepticism. Almost. But as Todd Gitlin points out in the foreward, Riesman's theories are tied to a population theory (other-directed societies could supposedly be distinguished by their lower birth rates in combination with economic prosperity) that was almost immediately overturned by the baby boom in the years immediately following the publication of the book. Riesman himself in the reprint of his introduction from a previous edition points out the flaw in the population projection, recanting this part of his theory. And although the flaw is minor in the sense of the meat of the book -- psychologizing various populations at certain stages in their economic development, it does began after awhile to discredit even the psychologizing. For so tightly does he link the other-directed to a phenomenon which is almost immediately proved wrong, that it calls into question everything else he contends. Remember the book "The Population Bomb" which predicted in the 60s that world would soon be overrun with humanity? It didn't take into consideration famine, disease, war -- the usual plagues of humanity. There is nothing so humbling as building a theory on bad demographic predictions.

Whether or not the theories about social character are true, they were extraordinarily influential at the time, shaping ideas about the American character and American society that persist fifty years later. There are parts of this book -- most of it in fact -- that feels vital and true to this day. The question is, however, is this because the ideas contained herein have become so dissolved into the cultural discourse that they have become true in the retelling, or are they literally true for their time and so remain?

That's part of the fun of reading this old chestnut -- deciding for yourself!

Phil Ochs'sarcastic "Love Me I'm a Liberal" seems to have been written to criticize trains of thought such as those in Gitlin's opening pages...

The book may offer some helpful insights elsewhere, and some solid, detailed history of recent times, but I am going to try to spend my limited time reading things that seem more respectful of others and truly inspired...

In this book, Gitlin's strategy is to try to lower the heat of the culture wars through a "pox on both their houses" retelling of its genesis and most important battles. His attempt to shed light on the destructive effects of identity politics as practiced by the Left and distorted by the right feels forthright and balanced. There's a good summary of the influence of various thinkers on the academic Left: Foucalt, Derrida, Horkheimer, Adorno, all of whom attacked the Enlightenment project in varying degrees, ushering in the era of "relativism." Also, he anticipates much of the ad hominen counter-Enlightenment criticism to be heaped on him by Lefty reviewers ' e.g., he's an old white male liberal academic Jewish prof out of touch with the latest radical twist on of those white male French guys, who still believes there can be a Left, and liberal and progressive causes worth fighting for. In other words, he does not agree with one of his graduate students who told him there is "no such thing as truth ' there are only truth effects." (Gitlin nicely points out that anti-Enlightenment types still use the ground rules established by the Enlightenment to attack the Enlightenment).

He starts the book with a first hand report on the difficulties of getting a new textbook series approved in Oakland, CA, which serves to demonstrate on a practical level the effect of post-modernist theory. Identity politics, that hydra-headed hyphenating monster (Japanese-Americans, African-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Mexican-Americans, etc.) kicked up so much dust that Oakland didn't succeed in adopting any textbooks for at least two years. By contrast, the conservatives who protested were easy to mollify: some minor revisions mentioning creationism and they were fine. The hyphenates major complaint? The textbooks didn't treat their various victimologies fully enough. Or that their stories were not told with enough obsequiousness and guilt. The textbooks themselves, in trying to anticipate such criticisms, broke up the main narrative with a multi-media look, and multi-perspectivist story-telling strategy.

Less balanced is his description of how the false crisis of P(olitical) C(orrectness) was created in think tanks fueled by conservative money men (Olin, Heritage, etc.), spread by D'Souza and others, and promulgated through the media to whom it was cynically and successfully pitched as a story of "free speech denied." But then, Gitlin couldn't have "balanced" this chapter in the Culture War because the Left, ambushed by the conservatives, couldn't recover fast enough, and never had a chance to tell its side of the story in any meaningful way. It was an upside-down time when conservatives got to call liberals anti free-speech and McCarthy-like. Those free speech loving conservative anti-PC warriors were suddenly keeping America safe for good old-fashioned race-baiting, gender intolerance and just plain good ol' hate! I know they helped me see how wrong to be anti-anti-woman, anti-anti-Semitic, anti-racist, and anti-fascist.

Eventually this latest semi-real war against terrorism will die out and we'll see the usual rancor return. In fact, the lack of a budget consensus now is a welcome step in that direction!