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Category Archive: Media

Attributed Celebrity - August 16, 2007
Chris Rojek describes celebrity as "the attribution of glamorous or notorious status to an individual within the public sphere." He recognizes there are other forms of celebrity: the "ascribed" celebrity of inherited status (Prince William, eg), and the "achieved" celebrity...

Scenes of free speech - May 22, 2007
The first rule of Adcult, Twitchell says, is "Speech is never free." For example: "In 1986 the [Reader's] Digest turned town an advertising supplement on heart disease and cigarette smoking prepared by the American Heart Association." The Digest had never...

Eat Popcorn - May 22, 2007
In his highly entertaining history of American Advertising (Adcult USA) James Twitchell summarizes the dubious contribution of James Vicary to our understanding of subliminal advertising. Vicary claimed that by inserting subliminal messages to "Eat Popcorn" and "Drink Coke," he had...

Instruments of torture - May 11, 2007
The "Middle Ages only had thumb screws, not the media." -Karl Kraus, early 20th century Viennese writer...

Means and ends - December 14, 2006
Thoreau wrote, "Our inventions . . . are but improved means to an unimproved end. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to...

Mediated - December 14, 2006
Instead of continuing to quote de Zengotita until I've transcribed the whole book, let me summarize: This is the best anthropology of contemporary culture I've ever read. Somewhat reductive - I'm not sure that everything is so shaped by media...

Predictable surprise - December 14, 2006
De Zengotita again, commenting on how lame action/sci fi movies have become: "There's this very specific phase in so many of these films, a phase that's so marked I bet there's some insider lingo for it. It's when the suspenseful...

Mediating the Other - December 13, 2006
De Zengotita notes the paradox of modernity/postmodernity's affirmation of the Other: "instead of treating the Other as an alien something - threatening in some cases, alluring in others, but in all cases an object, whether of conquest, exploitation, proselytizing, study,...

Mediated - December 12, 2006
Mediated by Thomas de Zengotita (Bloomsbury, 2005) comes highly recommended from Ken Myers. No wonder. This is a very thoughtful book, written with great energy. Every paragraph is quotable, and has the effect of holding up a mirror to the...

Community and New Communications - February 23, 2006
Mark Poster points to a tension between the modern institutions of production and the postmodern technologies of communication, particularly as they impact the formation of the self: "If modernity or the mode of production signifies patterned practices that elicit identities...

Telephone - February 23, 2006
Prior to World War I, Telefon Hirmondo, the telephone system of Budapest, was used as a broadcast system, with a published schedule of programs that were restricted to certain classes of people in Hungary. Only later did it develop into...

Art for Art - January 20, 2006
Adorno points out in an essay on television that "it would be romanticizing to assume that formlerly art was entirely pure, that the creative artist thought only in terms of the inner consistency of the artifact and not also of...

Circulation of opinion - August 16, 2005
Last week, The New Republic posted a lengthy article by Jerry Coyne on Intelligent Design (ID) on its web site, along with a brief piece by Leon Wieseltier. Yesterday, the local paper carried a brief excerpt from the Columbus, Ohio,...

Power and Celebrity - June 22, 2005
In his 1999 book, How the News Makes Us Dumb, C. John Sommerville wisely notes the difference between power and celebrity. He notes that news is a product, determined by "what publishers think they can get us interested in and...

In Praise of Censorship - June 15, 2004
David Bentley Hart offers a lively and wide-ranging defense of censorship in an article in the current issue of First Things. He savages the standard arguments against censorship: the slippery-slope argument (Hart: "Apparently, as a society, we are poised precariously...

McLuhan and Teilhard - April 19, 2004
Tom Wolfe has a fascinating sketch of the life and work of Marshall McLuhan in the Spring 2004 issue of The Wilson Quarterly. McLuhan converted to Catholicism during his studies, and Wolfe suggests that McLuhan's greatest inspiration was a hidden...

Scruton on Westernism - February 16, 2004
Roger Scruton reviews David Hurst's *On Westernism* in the January 23 issue of the TLS. While challenging Hurst's use of Richard Dawkins's concept of "meme," he concludes that it is an important book about the contours and imposition of the...

Epstein on Steiner - February 09, 2004
Joseph Epstein goes to town pricking the inflated reputation of George Steiner in the Feb 16 issue of the Weekly Standard. Among his jibes: "I once, in print, referred to Harold Bloom as George Steiner without the sense of humor,...

James Welch - January 26, 2004
There's an intriguing review of the work of James Welch in the January 26 Weekly Standard. Welch, who died last year, was a Montana-based poet and novelist, known as an "Indian poet" and "Indian novelist" for his focus on the...

Books and Culture Reviews - January 01, 2004
A potpourri of interesting reviews in Books & Culture: 1) Gerald McDermott reviews several recent evangelical books on Christianity's relation to non-Christian religions. He is critical of attempts (Paul Heim, e.g.) to root a pluralist or inclusivist view of other...

Archbishop Akinola - October 13, 2003
There's a very moving piece on the Nigerian Anglican, Archbishop Peter Jasper Akinola in the current issue of the Atlantic Monthly, written by Philip Jenkins. It's wonderful to see how the Lord is raising up sturdy Christian leaders from the...

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