Redeeming Modernity: Contradictions in Media Criticism

This book examines the explicit and implicit logic operating in claims of media influence. Beginning with a close analysis of arguments by four critical voices - Dwight Macdonald, Daniel Boorstin, Stuart Ewen and Neil Postman - on the nature of media influence, the author demonstrates how they mobilize three dominant metaphors - media as information, media as art, and media as education. She then examines the historical and intellectual roots of these concepts in American social and cultural thought and explores media as a new technology as a means for more positive expectations of media influence. The book closes with a section considering how debates on postmodernism redirect but do not resolve the basic contradictions in social and cultu