Jack Lule > Quotes

“But too often the media are instead complacent, satisfied with pictures over understanding, conflict over content, profit over purpose. The media amuse and distract rather than disturb and focus. The media excel at entertainment and escape. They too often allow us to avoid the real troubles of the world with barking broadcasters, lavish films, sooth-ing songs, endless e-mail, and infinite networking. At times, the media are even complicit in the division and deprivation that disfigure this globe. They profit from tragedy. They produce a “pornography of grief.”
― Jack Lule

“One important theme of this book is that globalization and media are not abstract, unknowable, inevitable, inexorable forces of economics and technology. They are not out of the control of human hands. They have been and will be created by people. They are the result of human actions, or what academics call “human agency.”
― Jack Lule

“Because I am a professor, I will later give dry, dense, detailed defini-tions for globalization and media. But for now, a perfectly good definition of globalization is anytime anyone does anything anywhere across borders. And a perfectly good definition of media is anything people use to communicate. Those definitions work because they emphasize people and human action.”
― Jack Lule, Globalization and Media: Global Village of Babel

“Interpretation and criticism can rescue people from metaphors that kill.”
― Jack Lule

“nstead, these partners, globalization and media, I will show, are combining to create a dark and divided village, a village of gated communities and border walls, vigilantes and refugees, hunters and hunted, garrisons and ghettos, suffering and surfeit, beauty and decay, alienation and mediation.”
― jack lule

“Minute by minute, over the course of the day, Nike’s stock price was updated. Minute by minute, over the course of the day, thousands of children died from starvation. There was no ticker for them. No news of them.”
― Jack Lule

“The starvation of children does not happen simply because of pov-erty and famine. Other human forces, too, roil our world, forces shaped by globalization and media. Neighbors slaughter neighbors in ethnic conflicts. Religious leaders plant discord that pits believers against one another. Cor-rupt rulers foment internecine warfare while enriching their own coffers. Pirates, drug lords, and militias still prowl villages and seas. Companies rape the environment and rob the land of its ability to nurture and support. Obscenely rich classes lead extravagant, wasteful lives while others wither in their shadows. We will see how human actors have shaped globalization and media to construct such a world. We cannot yet celebrate.”
― Jack Lule, Globalization and Media: Global Village of Babel