Authentic New Orleans: Tourism, Culture and Race in the Big Easy

the highly rational mode of interaction in everyday life. Because long-lasting emotional experiences could get in the way of work obligations, people came to “crave .|.|. particular kinds of feelings—disposable ones” (p. 41). The media torrent, with its ability to offer an immense variety of brief emotional experiences, was the perfect salve for the tedium of everyday life. Thus, with a constant demand, argues Gitlin, corporate media outlets were all too willing to offer a seemingly endless supply. In his chapter on the speed of the media torrent, Gitlin offers findings from two brief content analyses—one of bestselling novels and the other from popular magazines— demonstrating the tendency toward a far more staccato writing style in recent years that employs more brief sentences. Gitlin also suggests that Hollywood movies and television shows have increasingly moved at faster tempos, best exemplified by the Keanu Reeves’ thriller, Speed, and the innovative children’s show, Sesame Street, which features incredibly short, rapid-fire segments. Though Gitlin is certainly successful in documenting the trend toward speed and how it was enabled by technological growth, his explanation for popular demand for speed is less satisfying: “The dirty little secret is that ours is a civilization that revels in the pure experience of speed” (p. 105). That people delight in speed is no doubt a reason why producers create fast movies, but it remains unanswered why so many people take pleasure in speed. The weakest part of the book (Chapter Three) comes when Gitlin delineates several ideal typical styles of coping with the media torrent: fans, critics, paranoids, exhibitionists, ironists, jammers, secessionists, and abolitionists. Given that Gitlin has spent much of the book problematizing a facet of contemporary life that many of us take for granted, it is a surprise that rather than describing more closely what broad social reforms we might pursue, we are given a far more personal account of how most people deal with the torrent. Though Gitlin clearly worries about the political and social consequences of the massive influx of media, his too-brief treatment of the political fallout and what can be done about it leave the reader feeling helpless in the face of a tidal wave. In the new 2007 afterword, Gitlin notes the trend to media multi-tasking and that one of the victims of the expansion of electronic media usage has been book reading. At the same time, he seems delighted by the growth in amateur access to media, praising the capacity of the Internet to allow for political mobilization by groups like MoveOn.org and for increased balance of media giants by average citizens on political blogs and YouTube. Of course, citizens are limited in their expression by the rules set forth by the major companies like YouTube, WordPress, and Blogger that provide users with their virtual forum. But, more importantly, whether created by citizens or corporations, all of these sources add to the ever-expanding media torrent. As Gitlin notes in conclusion to the 2002 portion of the book, liberal and conservative alike, nearly all media reformers “share an ideal: more media, more of the time” (p. 209).