←Return to The Sound Bite Society Overview

INTRODUCTION: THE POLITICS OF ELECTRONIC INFORMATION

"We've got to face it. Politics have entered a new stage, the television stage. Instead of long-winded public debates, the people want capsule slogans - "Time for a change" - "The mess in Washington" - "More bang for a buck" - punchlines and glamour."

- General Haynesworth, media mogul in the Budd Schulberg film A Face in the Crowd, 1957.

1. The Sound Bite Society

2. Technology and the Information Revolution

3. A Preview of the Argument

4. Some Preliminary Definitions

5. The Complexity Paradox

6. The Medium in the Mirror

CHAPTER ONE: THE ASCENT OF THE ELECTRONIC RIGHT

"What distinguishes the New Right from other American reactionary movements and what it shares with the early phase of German fascism, is its incorporation of conservative impulses into a system of representation consisting largely of media techniques and media images."

- Philip Bishop

1. The Pull of the Center and the Rise of the Right

2. Sound Bite Politics

3. A Thought Experiment

4. Economic and Regulatory Barriers

5. The Quasi-Myth of Liberal Bias in the Media

6. Institutional Barriers: Who's Tilting the Screen?

7. Broadcasting and the Religious Right

8. Tabloidization: The News at Twilight

CHAPTER TWO: SHOUTING HEADS: THE LANGUAGE OF TELEVISION

"Things in motion sooner catch the eye
 Than what stirs not."

- Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

1. Television and Mediation

2. The Surrogate Eye

3. The Grammar of Television

4. The Uses of Symbolism

5. Sound Bites Man

6. Summary: The Language of Television 

CHAPTER THREE: VIDEO GAMES: TELEVISION AND REALITY

"You're beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal ... In God's name, you people are the real thing; we're the illusion."

- Howard Beale, character in Paddy Chayevsky's Network

1. The Medium and the Message

2. Veracity and Verisimilitude

3. For and Against Reality

4. Teleconsciousness: The Synthetic Revolution

5. History and Reality

6. Technology and Reality

7. Summary: The Panoptic Fallacy

CHAPTER FOUR: COMPLEXITY AND IDEOLOGY

"Finding the real identity beneath the apparent contradiction and differentiation, and finding the substantial diversity beneath the apparent identity, is the most delicate, misunderstood and yet essential endowment of the critic of ideas and the historian."

- Antonio Gramsci

1. Television's Myopia and the Problem of Complexity

2. Political Dimensions of Complexity

3. Analytic Complexity and the Geography of the Mind

4. Polarized Thinking and the Agony of Ambiguity

5. Summary: The Forms and Uses of Complexity

6. The Political Spectrum: Formal and Synthetic Visions

7. The Three Equalities

8. The Politics of Causality

9. Contestability and the Uses of Agnosticism

CHAPTER FIVE: CRITICAL VISION: TELEVISION AND THE ATTENTIVE SOCIETY

"As individuals and as a nation, we now suffer from social narcissism. The beloved Echo of our ancestors, the virgin America, has been abandoned. We have fallen in love with our own image, with images of our making, which turn out to be images of ourselves."

- Daniel Boorstin, The Image (1961)

1. The Critical Imperative

2. The Politics of Simplicity

3. Critical Viewing and Media Literacy

4. Critical Dialogue and Democratic Citizenship

5. The Attentive Society: Journalism and Ideological Literacy

6. Roadblocks and Remedies

7. The Critical Spirit