Media Spectacle

by Douglas Kellner

During the mid-1990s, the O.J. Simpson murder trials dominated the media in the United States and were circulated throughout the world via global communications networks. The case became a spectacle of race, gender, class and violence, bringing in elements of domestic melodrama, crime drama and legal drama. According to cultural critic and scholar Douglas Kellner, the Simpson case was just one example of what the author calls 'media spectacle' -- a form of media culture that puts contemporary dreams, nightmares, fantasies and values on display. Through the analysis of several such media spectacles -- including Elvis, the X Files, Michael Jordan, and the Bill Clinton sex scandals - Kellner's insightful and fascinating book draws out important insights into media, journalism, the public sphere and politics in an era of new technologies. "Media Spectacle" is a brilliant dissection of contemporary society; its ongoing appetite for scandal, tragedy and perversion; and the new technologies and media that strive to feed this immense hunger. This is cultural criticism and media analysis at its best.

Genres: Academic

ebook

First published November 28, 2002

About the author

Douglas Kellner is a "third generation" critical theorist in the tradition of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, or Frankfurt School. Kellner was an early theorist of the field of critical media literacy and has been a leading theorist of media culture generally.[citation needed] In his recent work, he has increasingly argued that media culture has become dominated by the forms of spectacle and mega-spectacle. He also has contributed important studies of alter-globalization processes, and has always been concerned with counter-hegemonic movements and alternative cultural expressions in the name of a more radically democratic society.

Kellner has written with a number of authors, including (with Steven Best) an award-winning trilogy of books on postmodern turns in philosophy, the arts, and in science and technology. More recently, he is known for his work exploring the politically oppositional potentials of new media and attempted to delineate what they term "multiple technoliteracies" as a movement away from the present attempt to standardize a corporatist form of computer literacy. Previously, Kellner served as the literary executor of the famed documentary film maker Emile de Antonio and is presently overseeing the publication of six volumes of the collected papers of the critical theorist Herbert Marcuse. At present, Kellner is the George Kneller Chair in the Philosophy of Education in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.