Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
emulate; religion, politics, and education, for example, all were forced to
become
entertaining
in order to draw adherents (Postman 1985). Meyrowitz
(1985) cautions that the presence of television tends to blur social roles that
formerly remained distinct, in particular as the masses glimpse the lifestyles
of the elite. Similarly, Shields (1992) asserts that electronic media eliminate
the illusion of nearness or distance, dissolving subjects' sense of social and
spatial proximity.
Despite its origins during late modernity, television may be regarded as a
distinctively postmodern medium by virtue of how it challenges modern
emphases on linear rationality, contextual coherence, continuity of narrative,
detached comprehensiveness, and objectivity (Romanyshyn 1993). In its
place, television o
oods the
viewer with massive volumes of unstructured information, one in which local
context is trivialized, the continuity of narratives is broken into incoherent,
even random segments (e.g., a murder, then a fast-food advertisement), and
the boundaries between fact and
ff
ers a surreal postliterate orality/aurality that
fl
fi
fiction are blurred to the point of nonexist-
ence. Far from the uni
ed Cartesian cogito, the television watcher lives in a
waking dream of endless stimulation and distraction. Television serves as a
narcotic to facilitate the ever-deeper penetration of the commodity into the
passive mass of viewers, for whom sustained, critical, independent thought
becomes ever more di
fi
cult. Harvey (1989a:61) notes that “Television is itself
a product of late capitalism and, as such, has to be seen in the promotion of a
culture of consumerism.”
Geographically, television functions as an intangible “place” of shared
experiences that entertains, informs, and motivates its viewers (Adams 1992),
a community without propinquity in which the social and physical dimen-
sions of life are detached from one another. Television's instantaneous depic-
tion of distant events often generated, albeit unintentionally, sympathetic
bonds of responsibility, a role
fi
first evident during the Vietnam War, which
injected the con
fl
ict directly into the living rooms of middle-class America.
The
ict,
largely due to the role played by CNN, the Cable News Network (Virilio
1995, 1999). Thus, television is not simply a spectator in the creation of
postmodern geographies, but an active participant, shaping the values and
behaviors of billions of people worldwide. As Lyotard (1984) emphasized,
the proliferation of electronic information forms an integral part of the dis-
integration of centralized political and philosophical perspectives, the death
of grand sweeping metanarratives. Baudrillard (1994) suggests that this pro-
cess coincides with the emergence of postmodern capitalism, in which images
displace proximity as the source of discursive authority.
fi
first Gulf War in 1991 was covered live from both sides of the con
fl
The seductive worlds of postmodern consumption
As an integral part of capitalism, consumption of course has a long and impor-
tant history. Indeed, the bourgeois ethic, with its emphasis on acquisition and
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