Thursday 24 April 2014

Addicted to distraction: Psychological consequences of the modern Mass Media

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It isn't published yet, but my new book is now listed on Amazon.

http://tinyurl.com/q46qwqa

Addicted to distraction: Psychological consequences of the modern Mass Media 

University of Buckingham Press - forthcoming.


In this groundbreaking study, Bruce Charlton sheds brilliant light on fundamental features of our current situation. He develops Marshall McLuhan's insight that "the medium is the message" into a deeply illuminating account of the mass media as a self-sustaining techno-cultural system that absorbs the whole of human life into a virtual world of willfulness and unreality. Like Plato in his Myth of the Cave, he calls for each of us to turn away from flickering images and toward realities. We need to heed that call. 

--James Kalb: author of The Tyranny of Liberalism and Against Inclusiveness


Addicted to Distraction by Bruce G Charlton is a brilliant, pithy, and incisive analysis and condemnation of the modern mass media and its semipurposeful agenda of permanent revolution, permanent hysteria, and permanent chaos. His comments are as cutting as the scalpel of a surgeon performing an autopsy, and his insights a bright and clear as the merciless lights in an operating theater. Can a fish drown? Can it even notice the waters in which it lives and moves? No more than can we notice the totalitarian relativism of the modern mass media. The Mass Media is a roaring, grinding attention-grabbing machine which operates with no set purpose; except the purpose to subvert, uncreate, mock and destroy. It does not matter what the media destroys. Pointless subversion is the point of the media, and the medium is the message. By all means read and understand this book ... and then go out by yourself into the calm and silent wilderness for a year. 

--John C Wright, author and Nebula Award finalist

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2 comments:

Ben said...

Pre-ordered. Thanks.

Bruce Charlton said...

@Ben - Hope you enjoy it.

I should note that I don't make any money from book sales - I waive all fees and royalties (not that they would be very large!) in return for posting the book on the internet after a year. But I am pleased that the publishers get some financial reward for publishing my books - otherwise they would stop doing so!