Atlantic Unbound | Fallows@large | 2002.04.03
Subject: Re: The weirdness of being awash in media

We flatter ourselves when we conjure an "information society"—the term's a tribute our nervous system pays to our rationality. Even when we collect information, we feel—feel excited, sad, frightened, bored, tickled, masterful, all sorts of things. As image- and sound-consumers, we feel and aim to feel—shallowly, for the most part. Engineers and consumers alike who race toward the next wave of technologies are also juiced up by feeling (much as the decisions of technologists and investors have to be dressed up as rational calculations). 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. Robert Putnam's argument on this score in Bowling Alone seems to me irrefutable, though obviously there are other factors involved.
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/fallows/jf2002-04-03/gitlin1.htm