iPleadGuilty: Todd Gitlin on what media saturation is doing to us: 'Much as we fancy ourselves rational choosers - well, at least lots of academics and media professionals do - we spend much of our lives feeling ready to yield to the next feeling, each demanding little of us but that we sit at the ready, remote-control or Walkman in hand, finger poised at the radio scan button, looking for the next new thing, or at least the next next thing. Here is what links Fox and PBS, National Geographic and Maxim. Disposable feelings give alibis for social and political disengagement.

'I worry about the psychic or (if you like) spiritual imbalance that comes when media are so convenient for launching these little emotional epiphanies - feelings that, in the main, don't stick around to demand much of us. It's cool to zap, surf, float. But what happens when we need to be uncool - say, about global warming, terrorism, all kinds of avoidable suffering in the world?'
[Atlantic Monthly].

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