Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
This is an inaugural lecture Raymond Williams gave in 1974, when he assumed a professorship in drama at Cambridge University. He’s saying that drama is central to the form of civilization that has evolved, by which he means that there’s so much drama in everything, from advertising to television serials, to the contents of newspapers and magazines. The sheer quantity of a certain kind of media experience creates a different way of life.
So your next selection is an article, Raymond Williams’s “Drama in a Dramatized Society”.
This is an inaugural lecture Raymond Williams gave in 1974, when he assumed a professorship in drama at Cambridge University. He’s one of the most fertile minds when it comes to media in the last century. Basically he’s saying that it’s extremely odd, and yet central, to the form of civilization that has evolved, that there’s so much drama. And what he means by drama is not simply normal plays, but everything from advertising to television serials, to the contents of newspapers and magazines. He died in 1988 before a lot of the new technology we have now appeared; he had not encountered the iPhone. But he anticipates a life in which people are immersed in narrative nonstop. I would add sound, or song, as another important component. This article is, at least to my way of thinking, the earliest statement of the point that quantity becomes quality. The quantity of a certain kind of media experience creates a different way of life, which is in fact ours. Williams directed us into the whole problem of media saturation as a phenomenon worthy of treatment in its own right.
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Todd Gitlin is a professor of journalism and sociology, as well as chair of the PhD program in communications at Columbia University. He is the author of 12 books, several of which concern media and culture, and a prominent commentator on the US media. He writes regularly for Dissent, The American Prospect, TPMcafe.com, and opendemocracy.net. He suggests that no successful model for newspapers to make money from the internet exists, and that there is no future for the industry without government support.
