Art & Creativity Quote by Todd Gitlin

Gitlin’s “torrent” is doing double duty: it’s an image of overwhelming force and a quiet rebuke to our reflex to either drown in information or pretend we can outrun it. He’s not offering a grand solution. He’s staging a small, disciplined move that sociologists and media critics prize: distance. “Step back” sounds almost therapeutic, but it’s also methodological. Before you can act, you have to name the scale of what you’re inside of - not as a mood, but as a structure.

The phrasing is careful. “Face the enormity” rejects the cozy fantasy that our feeds, crises, and cultural churn are manageable if we just optimize harder. “Torrent” suggests speed, volume, and a kind of violence: the sense that contemporary life arrives as flood rather than sequence. Gitlin’s subtext is that the torrent isn’t simply “too much stuff”; it’s a system with incentives - attention markets, political spectacle, institutional drift - that makes everything feel equally urgent and therefore equally paralyzing.

The real pivot is the modesty of “the first step.” He’s wary of the heroic posture of immediate, totalizing action. He’s also wary of cynicism, which treats the torrent as fate. By framing imagination as a consequence of clear-eyed appraisal, he’s arguing that agency begins not with certainty but with scale-awareness: you can’t choose what to do until you’ve admitted what you’re up against.

Contextually, this reads like late-career Gitlin: a thinker shaped by 1960s activism and decades of watching media accelerate, insisting that critique isn’t pessimism. It’s the entry fee for meaningful politics.