Addicted To Distraction: Psychological consequences of the modern Mass Media

Bruce Charlton

• Publisher: University of Buckingham Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781789559996
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

For most of us the Mass Media is the focus of our lives - it provides the material which is discussed and debated, it articulates our responses and it provides the framework by which a vast potential volume of material is filtered, prioritised and interpreted. Headlines and sound-bites vie arbitrarily for our attention: famine relief in an African country, the sacking of a celebrity; honouring a sports hero; a Royal Wedding; the wonders of a new computer, a tax on 'carbon'; the trial or indeed knighthood of a sexual offender...

With the pace of its growth and advances in technology, the Mass Media affects us by its system properties - that is by its attention-grabbing ability, its addictiveness, its pervasiveness; its whole way of evaluating and presenting stimuli to which we become assimilated and addicted. The reality is that anything can be treated as overwhelmingly important, urgent, desperate, demanding of action now, but as easily forgotten. The medium has outgrown the message. The overall fact of this massive system has become more important than the details of its communications.

Stimulated by the horrific revelations of the Jimmy Savile affair at the BBC, with its implications of wholesale Establishment corruption and a sustained media cover-up, this book diagnoses the fundamental problem of the modern world as addiction to the distractions of the Mass Media and points to the only logical destination of its expansion: the destruction of society itself.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• The medium is the message
• Contents
• Introduction
• Mass Media – Singular or Plural?
• We live in the grip of delusion
• What is the Mass Media?
• What is the problem?
• Opinionated Relativism
• Permanent Revolution
• Does the Mass media have a Leftist bias?
• The intrinsic function is just… to grow
• The paradox of Mass Media control
• The Mass Media will destroy social cohesion
• Opinionated Relativism v communism
• Chaos begets chaos
• Participation is primary
• Mass Media addiction
• System-language of the Mass Media
• Oppositional ideology of PC
• Acknowledgement of reality
• Product of, and therapy for, modernity
• Blind the people
• First-strike framing
• From hero to antihero
• Pervasive demonic perspective
• Negativism – a tool for self-cure
• The modern Luddite
• How the Mass Media learns to do harm
• Social Media = Mass Media
• The Mass Media versus religion
• The purpose of modern life: to feed the Media
• Can you handle it?
• Environmental overload makes simple minds
• The savage triviality of Mass Media morality
• The need for eternal vigilance
• How to cure an addicted society
• Escaping the colonization of small talk
• Withdrawal and detox programme
• Who needs withdrawal and detox?
• Postscript: the Jimmy Savile affair
• Technical Appendix
• Notes and references