Supersaturation, or, the Media Torrent and Disposable Feeling

Supersaturation, or, the Media Torrent and Disposable Feeling

"Supersaturation, or, The Media Torrent and Disposable Feeling" sets the theme for the four chapters. The actuality is we just have and ample amount, way too much of it.

Gitlin takes it back to the beginning of a media-centered world which took place in the seventeenth-century Dutch homes. The Dutch homes were covered with paintings of people and places making it possible where "they featured such renderings of the outer world. These pictures were pleasing, but more; they were proofs of taste and prosperity, amusements and news at once". Gitlin goes on to say, "The pleasures of acquisition in seventeenth-century Delft led to the pleasures of consumption in twenty-first-century New York". From previous knowledge the media torrent basically started to take place with the coming up of our technological developments close to the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. The heart of modernity, a quick, information-based way of life, is "the panoply of appearances that emerged in everyday life".

At the base of modernity is a money-centered, commodity-based culture. "The consumption of images and sounds was an extension of the burgeoning consumption of goods," Gitlin writes. Todd sees a money economy as the source for impersonal relations, which in turn fuel a personal quest for "disposable feelings" through "simulated sensations" that require no commitment.

It is not that "human beings suddenly began to feel, but that, in recent centuries, they came to experience, and crave, particular kinds of feelingsā€¦.disposable ones." The connection of use is that we need the constant drama to provide the feelings that are temporary.

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