The Roar of the Crowd: How Television and People Power Are Changing the World - Hardcover

O'Neill, Michael J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812920783 ISBN 13: 9780812920789

Publisher: Times Books, 1993

Synopsis

Examines the role of mass communication in modern politics, in the way ordinary people perceive the political process, and in modern crises, such as the fall of Soviet communism and Tiananmen Square. 15,000 first printing.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

A perceptive, albeit none-too-sanguine, appreciation of the literally earth-shaking ways in which space-age communications technologies are reordering the world in the wake of the cold war- -which they helped to end. Opening with a fast-forward account of how video images made the difference for Boris Yeltsin in his 1991 confrontation with reactionaries, O'Neill (former editor of N.Y.C.'s Daily News) assesses links between the increasingly expansive transmission of audio/visual information and the convulsive events that have become today's norm. To begin with, he argues, TV has broken the knowledge monopoly of literate elites, affording peasant populations a historic opportunity to claim full rights of citizenship in what promises to be a world society. Informed in real time about their counterparts in other lands, people everywhere are taking a greater interest in public affairs; given this circumstance, popular sovereignty could be extended into areas as yet untouched by democracy. As much in sorrow as anger, the author notes that political leaders (elected or not) must now be telegenic if they are to hold the attention and allegiance of vital constituencies. O'Neill also points out that governance could prove more difficult as the electronic revolution helps create demands not easily met in formally captive nations and industrial powers alike: Among other unfortunate consequences, today's tuned-in, switched-on world is laboring under an information overload that makes it dangerously unstable. While O'Neill offers no comprehensive proposals for keeping civilization's uneasy peace, he suggests that responsible news-gathering organizations could engage in preventive journalism by making an effort to address causes before they become calamitous results (e.g., inner-city riots). Provocative perspectives on a McLuhanesque principle--the medium is the message. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly

Former New York Daily News editor O'Neill offers a savvy, if somewhat superficial survey of the effect of TV and other new communications technologies on politics and perception. Using mainly secondary sources, he describes events that were affected by instantaneous communication, like the aborted 1991 coup in Moscow, and goes on to map six often double-edged phenomena: faster, but generally unclear, information; the globalization of mass society; the mobilization of mass public opinion; the premium placed on telegenic leaders; media dependence on image over analysis; and a lack of institutions able to cope with shifting international relations. O'Neill ends with a quixotic exhortation, noting that the media should "search out the causes of social breakdowns before they turn into the failures and violence which the TV shows now celebrate." He offers no suggestions, however, as to how, in the market-driven American media, his worthy suggestion might be implemented.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Times Books
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0812920783
• ISBN 13: 9780812920789
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 228