Our picks for reading up on captive-audience issues
Audience captivity relates to audio-video media in places where we can’t ignore it. Why audio-video media and not print media? Because audio-video media is “push” media—that is, it captures what researchers call our “involuntary attention,” so when that media is located in places where we can’t ignore it, like elevators and buses, we are made captive to it. Print media, by contrast, is “pull” media. It doesn’t capture our attention involuntarily but must compel us, pull us in, before we engage its content. Therefore it is media of choice, not compulsion.
Thus, in our collection of books, we focus on those that look critically at audio-video media. And when we say “critically,” we don’t mean negatively but in the broader, Kantian sprit of criticism.
The selections below are in two categories: those that look at TV (video) and those that look at noise (audio).
The Age of American Unreason (Vintage)
Noise Wars: Compulsory Media and Our Loss of Autonomy
Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life
Living Without the Screen (Lea’s Communication)
The Assault on Reason
Media Unlimited, Revised Edition: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives
Television
Noise: How Our Media-saturated Culture Dominates Lives and Dismantles Families
Living Outside the Box: TV-Free Families Share Their Secrets
Remote Controlled: How TV Affects You and Your Family
The Big Turnoff: Confessions of a TV-Addicted Mom Trying to Raise a TV-Free Kid
Mediated: How the Media Shapes Our World and the Way We Live in It
Noise
Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing
iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
The Business of Media: Corporate Media and the Public Interest
The Medium is the Massage
We Know What You Want: How They Change Your Mind
(The Disinformation Company: 2004), Martin Howard and Douglas Rushkoff
The New Media Monopoly
Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition (Console-ing Passions)
Feed
The Problem of the Media: U.S. Communication Politics in the Twenty-First Century
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
The Plug-In Drug: Television, Computers, and Family Life
T.V.: The Great Escape! : Life-Changing Stories from Those Who Dared to Take Control
Bowling Alone : The Collapse and Revival of American Community
Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space (Console-ing Passions)
Coercion: Why We Listen to What They Say
Glued to the Tube: The Threat of Television Addiction to Today’s Family
Endangered Minds: Why Children Don’t Think And What We Can Do About It
Culture Jam: How to Reverse America’s Suicidal Consumer Binge–And Why We Must
Spy TV
Get a Life!
Seducing America: How Television Charms the Modern Voter
The Commercialization of American Culture: New Advertising, Control and Democracy
…And There Was Television
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
The Disappearance of Childhood
The Unreality Industry: The Deliberate Manufacturing of Falsehood and What It Is Doing to Our Lives
Conscientious Objections: Stirring Up Trouble About Language, Technology and Education
The Age of Missing Information
Television and the Quality of Life: How Viewing Shapes Everyday Experience (Communication Series)
Fahrenheit 451
No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior
What to Do After You Turn Off the TV
Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man
The Space Merchants
One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Search for Natural Silence in a Noisy World
Listening Below the Noise: A Meditation on the Practice of Silence
Noise Wars: Compulsory Media and Our Loss of Autonomy
Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture, and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century (Inside Technology)
Manifesto for Silence: Confronting the Politics and Culture of Noise
Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?: Experiencing Aural Architecture
Too Loud, Too Bright, Too Fast, Too Tight: What to Do If You Are Sensory Defensive in an Overstimulating World
The Soundscape
Noise Pollution. A Scientific and Psychological Look at a New Hazard
The dangers of noise
The Tyranny of Noise
Noise Pollution, the Unquiet Crisis
