Here’s a 1996 article by Nick Gillespie entitled, “View Masters: The Audience’s Power Over Media’s Message, that appeared in Reason magazine. In it, Gillespie deftly considers, among other things, the relationship between audiences, passivity and consumerism. It’s a bit old and dated in some significant ways (much has happened since 1996 after all), but provocative and interesting nonetheless. Here’s a brief excerpt:

The notion of TV viewers and consumers of pop culture as intellectual couch potatoes closely parallels longstanding conventional scholarly analyses of how popular culture works. As with the political consensus, the intellectual indictment crosses traditional right/left boundaries. Critics usually charge that pop culture, in seeking the broadest audience possible, appeals to the lowest common denominator and thereby cheapens and coarsens society. Most critics take the argument a step further and claim that, even as pop culture gives the people what they want, it destroys consumers’ critical faculties, effectively infantalizing them.

Consider, for instance, conservative Allan Bloom’s commentary on rock music. In The Closing of the American Mind (1987), Bloom writes, “[R]ock music has one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire–not love, not eros, but sexual desire undeveloped and untutored….My concern here is not with the moral effects of this music–whether it leads to sex, violence, or drugs. The issue here is its effect on education, and I believe it ruins the imagination of young people and makes it very difficult for them to have a passionate relationship to the art and thought that are the substance of liberal education.”

Television can lay claim to the status of most-favored punching bag and academic attacks on the small screen are representative of broader indictments of pop culture. Watching the idiot box, goes the argument, turns viewers into idiots. As their titles suggest, books such as The Plug-In Drug, Media: The Second God, The Glass Teat (and its sequel, The Other Glass Teat), and Telegarbage attempt to detail just how horrible and intellectually enervating the medium actually is.

Boxed In: The Culture of TV (1988), by Mark Crispin Miller, a left-leaning media critic and professor at Johns Hopkins University, provides a good example. “Those who have grown up watching television are not, because of all that gaping, now automatically adept at visual interpretation. That spectatorial `experience’ is passive, mesmeric, undiscriminating, and therefore not conducive to the refinement of the critical faculties,” writes Miller.

Read the whole article here.