From Television to the Internet (Hardcover)

In covering the years from the late 1940s through 2000, this book's sociocultural focus is on the visual impact of momentous developments in postmodern media culture in America, particularly as they have reflected a narrowing of the divide between the elite and mass culture, blurring the lines between fantasy and reality, and the social fragmentation of American life. As such, this book complements and expands on the commentary and conclusions of the author's initial inquiry into the modern era of media-made culture in The Visual Focus of American Media Culture in the Twentieth Century (FDUP, 2004). From the 1890s to the 1920s and the depression and World War II years, society's pervasively communal focus demanded idealized images and romanticized interpretations of life. But the communal imperative, as evolving social change impacted it, harbored the seeds of its own disintegration. The sociocultural uprooting of another World War, the anxieties attendant to the Atomic Age, and two later sociopolitically divisive military conflicts culminated in the societal upheavals of the 1960s and an increasingly problematic and socially fragmented nation. Like the first book, the second also relies on the collective metaphor of the mediated vision to show how the visually oriented communication forms of the media culture have influenced and contributed to the origin of varied subcultural sectors in the postmodern era, extending from the appearance of television in the late 1940s to the advent of the Internet near the end of the century. As early as the prosperous postwar years, where this narrative begins, the mass media forms of the culture began to display the characteristics of postmodernism in the undermining of traditional values and the breakdown of the hierarchical division between the elite and mass culture - a major theme of this book. Thus, its attention to the media-made forms of the twentieth century's second half reveals how the postmodernist affinity for fantasizing reality transformed the escapi