Redeeming Modernity: Contradictions in Media Criticism

Communication and Human Values

by Joli Jensen

This book examines the explicit and implicit logic operating in claims of media influence. Beginning with a close analysis of arguments by four critical voices - Dwight Macdonald, Daniel Boorstin, Stuart Ewen and Neil Postman - on the nature of media influence, the author demonstrates how they mobilize three dominant metaphors - media as information, media as art, and media as education. She then examines the historical and intellectual roots of these concepts in American social and cultural thought and explores media as a new technology as a means for more positive expectations of media influence. The book closes with a section considering how debates on postmodernism redirect but do not resolve the basic contradictions in social and cultu

Paperback

First published June 1, 1990

About the author

Joli Jensen received her PhD in 1985 from the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois. She has been a faculty member at the University of Virginia (1984-1986) and at the University of Texas at Austin (1986-1991). She joined the Faculty of Communication at the University of Tulsa in 1991, where she became Hazel Rogers Professor of Communication in 2005. She also founded and directs the TU Henneke Faculty Writing Center.

Jensen initially majored in biology and psychology at the University of Nebraska, and begin a neuroscience PhD program at the University of Illinois, before switching into journalism and media studies.