A serious problem in America is the gap between academe and the mass media, which is our culture. Professors of humanities, with a...ll their leftist fantasies, have little direct knowledge of American life and no impact whatever on public policy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Aesthetically at odds, these two genres of mass humor form a Janus face of American culture. Stand-up is a surviving bastion of in...dividual expression. The comedian confronts the audience with his or her personality and wins celebration--the highest form of acceptance--or is scorned and rebuffed as a pitiable outsider. The heckler, the mood of the audience, or the temperature of the room cannot always be handled through quality control. Even when presented electronically, the jokes of a stand-up monologue cannot be underlined by canned laughter without the manipulation thoroughly exposing itself.... The sitcom, by contrast, is the technology of the assembly-line brought to art. Even when live audiences are used, their reactions are "sweetened" with carefully calculated titters, chortles, and guffaws. Large sums of investment capital must be assembled to produce a sitcom; all factors must be controlled by recognized experts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
At times it seems that the media have become the mainstream culture in children's lives. Parents have become the alternative. Amer...icans once expected parents to raise their children in accordance with the dominant cultural messages. Today they are expected to raise their children in opposition to it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Few white citizens are acquainted with blacks other than those projected by the media and the so--called educational system, which... is nothing more than a system of rewards and punishments based upon one's ability to pledge loyalty oaths to Anglo culture. The media and the "educational system" are the prime sources of racism in the United States.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Culture, then, is a study of perfection, and perfection which insists on becoming something rather than in having something, in an... inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, ...thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been erod...ed by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Media mystifications should not obfuscate a simple, perceivable fact; Black teenage girls do not create poverty by having babies. ...Quite the contrary, they have babies at such a young age precisely because they are poor--because they do not have the opportunity to acquire an education, because meaningful, well-paying jobs and creative forms of recreation are not accessible to them ... because safe, effective forms of contraception are not available to them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Television was far more pervasive and radicalizing than printing had been. It was massive. When Riesman and others spoke of books,... magazines, and radio as mass media, they could not imagine the size and shape of television. There never had been a medium that could reach everybody, and reach them with images of behavior as behavior without the rationalization of words. The audience for its programs was drawn from every social class and every social element. By the mere act of watching television, a heterogeneous society could engage in a purely homogeneous activity. Television images are more rapid and transient than the printed word. They make no demand on us to remember or reflect on them. This impermanence and the time of consumption cause us to spend extended hours with the medium but significantly less time with any one image or sequence of images. Television is instantaneous and simultaneous: Everyone gets the message at the same time and, at the same time that an event is happening. There is no lag time between a reporter witnessing an event and reporting it, and no time for reflection and analysis.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »