Page 203 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

JOBNAME: McGraw−TaylorHarris PAGE: 12 SESS: 12 OUTPUT: Mon Oct 8 09:09:34 2007 SUM: 4FA34CB8
/production/mcgraw−hill/booksxml/tayharris/chap08

188 Now
make wittingly or unwittingly to sell America to the world
should come back to haunt and curse us. Perhaps, instead of
announcing ourselves by our shadows and our idols, we would
do better to try to share with others the quest which has been
America.
(Boorstin [1961] 1992: 245–6; emphasis added)

Written at the height of the Cold War and although originally
referring to Communism, Boorstin’s above words are now painfully
relevant to the gulf that exists most significantly not just as a
geographical area to which troops are periodically dispatched but as
an alarming gap in cultural misunderstanding between Western and
Islamic sensitivities. This book’s analysis of the media’s over-
dependence upon images to the exclusion of more rational thought
implies crucial social consequences much greater than merely an
elitist perception of a loss of quality in the realm of culture. Boorstin
feared that America’s over-reliance upon images would come back to
haunt it. In a terrible fashion, the events of 9/11 confirmed his fear
and the continued, shallow image-based nature of the subsequent
media coverage merely served to reinforce the import of his words.
Writing a full 40 years before the World Trade Center (WTC)
terrorist incident, Boorstin foresaw this manner in which images
displace more substantive values and ideals to America’s own detri-
ment. His criticism of America’s obsession with image over substance
accurately sensed the visual form of Osama Bin Laden’s murderous
backlash in which he chose the heavily symbolic and visually striking
WTC towers for his act of destruction carefully designed to be
8
consumed as a media event .
On 11 th September 2001, Osama Bin Laden returned the Holly-
wood disaster movie to its homeland. He gained maximum media
impact by using visual terms deliberately designed to fit into the
functional categories of a semiotic communicational order ruled by
images and designed for the generation and manipulation of
uncritical emotion – the emo. This was demonstrated by the way in
which Ground Zero and its emergency workers quickly became
emotive icons. As such, the attack represents a perverse
re-engineering of the West’s perceived over-dependence upon images
by someone, who in Boorstin’s terms, represents a champion of
ideals (however distorted) over images and an otherwise natural
critic of the shallow values contained within pseudo-events of which
9/11 was such a tragic example . Despite the very real effects
9
experienced by its victims and those New Yorkers in the immediate
vicinity and aftermath, the rest of the USA experienced the WTC
attack as an excessive Hollywood-style privileging of the image – to
the extent that the release of several films was postponed because of
their perceived similarity to actual events. Hollywood producers were

Kerrypress Ltd – Typeset in XML A Division: chap08 F Sequential 12

www.kerrypress.co.uk - 01582 451331 - www.xpp-web-services.co.uk
McGraw Hill - 152mm x 229mm - Fonts: New Baskerville