"Collectively, we are in thrall to media - because they deliver to us many of the psychic goods we crave, and we know no other way to live"
About this Quote
Thrall is the right old-fashioned word here: it frames media not as a neutral “environment” but as a relationship of dependence, closer to enchantment than consumption. Gitlin’s intent is to puncture the comforting story that we choose media freely and rationally. He’s arguing that media win not just by entertaining us, but by supplying “psychic goods” - identity, belonging, reassurance, outrage on demand, the feeling of being plugged into the moment. Those aren’t luxuries; they’re emotional utilities. When they’re outsourced to platforms and screens, the dependence starts to look less like preference and more like infrastructure.
The subtext is a critique of modern autonomy. “Collectively” matters: Gitlin isn’t blaming individuals for weak will. He’s pointing at a shared social arrangement where attention becomes the default currency of public life and private coping. “We know no other way to live” is the real knife. It suggests that media saturation isn’t simply hard to quit; it’s become the operating system for social reality itself. To opt out risks social invisibility, informational ignorance, even a kind of civic illiteracy.
Contextually, Gitlin comes out of a tradition of media sociology shaped by mass broadcast culture, propaganda studies, and the politics of spectacle. Read today, the line feels eerily predictive of algorithmic feeds: the more precisely media learn what psychic goods we crave, the more they can sell those cravings back to us as necessity. The quote works because it refuses moral panic and goes for something colder: complicity without conspiracy, captivity without chains.
The subtext is a critique of modern autonomy. “Collectively” matters: Gitlin isn’t blaming individuals for weak will. He’s pointing at a shared social arrangement where attention becomes the default currency of public life and private coping. “We know no other way to live” is the real knife. It suggests that media saturation isn’t simply hard to quit; it’s become the operating system for social reality itself. To opt out risks social invisibility, informational ignorance, even a kind of civic illiteracy.
Contextually, Gitlin comes out of a tradition of media sociology shaped by mass broadcast culture, propaganda studies, and the politics of spectacle. Read today, the line feels eerily predictive of algorithmic feeds: the more precisely media learn what psychic goods we crave, the more they can sell those cravings back to us as necessity. The quote works because it refuses moral panic and goes for something colder: complicity without conspiracy, captivity without chains.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
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