Love Quote by Todd Gitlin

Gitlin’s jab lands because it refuses the comforting story we tell about media: that it mainly seduces us with shiny new wants. He shifts the target from desire to dissatisfaction, from appetite to ache. “Manufacture of desire” is the familiar critique of advertising and consumer culture; calling that idea not “at the heart” of the torrent is a provocation aimed at a whole genre of media commentary that treats people as simply manipulated into wanting products. Gitlin’s claim is sharper: the system works best when it keeps you slightly unhappy with whatever you have, whoever you are, and whatever you believe you should be by now.

The parenthetical aside - “if it isn’t absurd to speak of a heart” - is doing double duty. It’s a sociologist’s wink at metaphor (media isn’t an organism with a core), but it also implies a moral hollowness. A “torrent” doesn’t have a conscience; it has momentum. That’s the subtext: the media flow isn’t guided by a singular intention so much as by structural incentives that reward agitation, comparison, novelty, and low-grade anxiety.

“Chronic dissatisfaction” names the emotional baseline that keeps attention circulating. If you’re content, you log off. If you’re restless, you keep scrolling, shopping, watching, refreshing - not for pleasure exactly, but for relief. In the late-20th-century context Gitlin wrote from (mass broadcast giving way to cable abundance and then digital saturation), the critique anticipates an economy where engagement is fueled less by desire than by a persistent sense of not-enoughness. The genius - and the bleakness - is that dissatisfaction can be endlessly renewable.