This week I was asked to read “Media Unlimited” by Todd Gitlin and all I can say is I tried. I really tried. But this book is so goddamn dry that I just couldn’t absorb it in any meaningful capacity. I got about thirty pages in before I had to stop and literally say to myself “God this book is dense”. Then I thought, “It must just have a slow start. I’ll go deeper and find the good stuff”. So I opened to the middle and started skimming. But still, nothing.
This book is like a trash bag filled with facts and statistics packed so tightly that is just becomes one big ball of garbage. It reads more like a research paper than a book, so I turned to the last page to figure who this Todd Gitlin guy really is. And then I understood. This guy is a professional lecturer. And on top of that, he’s a professor at Columbia University. So I’m guessing that he really loves the sound of his own voice. He probably spends all day looking this stuff up just so he can regurgitate it in dense streams of information like this. And to top it all off, his cultural reference are all stuck in 2002. He mentions The Sopranos and Eminem as if they’re timeless cultural events.
To Sum up, I have nothing against college professors, but professional windbags like this are the reason students would sometimes rather surf the net than listen in class.
But you still have to dive back in and find out what the guy is saying. Perhaps it's all that surfing the net has made it hard to focus on stuff that might seem dry at first. (And even things that are dry all the way through sometimes have to be read.)
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