No sense of place

How have television and the other modern media affected our everyday experience? This question has generated a plethora of arguments and speculations, but no thinker has addressed the issue with such force and originality as Joshua Meyrowitz in No Sense of Place.

Whereas many experts have centered the debate on program content (the degree of sex and violence on specific shows, for example), Meyrowitz focuses on the media's broader effects, particularly their creation of "new social environments." The electronic media, he argues, have radically altered social roles by changing "who knows what about whom." Because of television, children today know much more about adult behavior including the ways in which adults control children than did earlier generations. Similarly, TV has exposed men and women to each other's strategies and domains, just as has taught all of us about the fallability of politicians (we now see them stammer, sweat, and stumble). The result, Meyrowitz contends, has been a shattering of roles that once were mystified, of barriers that once kept things in their place.