Plato's cave : television and its discontents / John O'Neill.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

O'Neill, John, 1933-2022.

Series:

Hampton Press communication series. Critical bodies

Critical bodies

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Mass media.

Television.

Physical Description:

xiii, 204 pages ; 23 cm.

Edition:

Revised edition.

Place of Publication:

Cresskill, N.J. : Hampton Press, [2002]

Contents:

Part I Political Economy and the Mediation of Desire 1

Introduction: Cave Culture and Tele-vision: Opening and Closing the American Mind 3

Cave Culture and the Closure of the American Academy 3

Media AIDS: Social Amnesia and Carnal Ignorance 7

Cave Culture and the Need For Tele-vision 12

Nightly News: Oiling the War Machine 15

Chapter 1 Looking into the Media: The Technology of Revelation and Subversion 19

The Media of Our Discontents 21

Toward a Theory of Communicative Subversion 30

Wild Sociology 33

Chapter 2 The Corporate Mediation of Private Lives and Public Apathy 37

Public and Private Space 39

Metabolism and Political Economy 41

Private Opulence and Public Squalor 43

Alienation and the Sublimation of Politics 47

Chapter 3 The Political Economy of Narcissism: Some Issues in the Loss of Family Eros 55

Narcissism and Defamilization 56

The Politics of Intimacy 60

The Homogenized Society and the Family of Eros 62

The Bourgeois Family and the Critical Public Realm 66

Chapter 4 Women as a Medium of Exchange: Defamilization and the Feminization of Law in Early and Late Capitalism 75

Some Issues in Feminist Economics 77

Some Issues in Feminist Psychoanalysis 80

From Family Wage to Social Wage 82

The Feminization of Sociolegal Discourse in Late Capitalism 85

Feminized Capitalism 92

Chapter 5 Political Communication: The Corporate Agenda and the Legitimation Problem 97

Part II Life-Worlds and the Mediation of Bio-Power 109

Chapter 6 Tele-vision and the Nationalist Platitude: Reflections on the Canada/USA Watch 111

Chapter 7 Bio-Communication: Empire and Biopower 131

Biopower. The Bias of Communication 132

The Biotext: The Communicative Tissue of Power 136

Chapter 8 MEDIA-culture and the Specular Functions of Ethnicity, Fashion, and Tourism 145

Chapter 9 Media AIDS: Communicable Disease, Sexual Ideology and Global Panic 155

Chapter 10 Televideo ergo sum: Some Hypotheses on the Specular Functions of the Media 169

The Dream of Things 169

The Specular Function of Things 174

Conclusion: Some Hypotheses on the Specular Functions of the Media 181

Conclusion: Reflections on the Day After Television 185.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

ISBN:

1572733896

157273390X

OCLC:

48675636