Anyway for those of you who don't know, as well as traditional paper copy; it is available free online in an unformatted text version (to copy, paste and print):
http://addictedtodistraction.blogspot.co.uk
Or, properly formatted, for a nominal price from Amazon Kindle.
The book was given very pleasing endorsements by Jim Kalb and John C Wright:
In
this groundbreaking study, Bruce Charlton sheds brilliant light on
fundamental features of our current situation. He develops Marshall
McLuhan's insight that "the medium is the message" into a deeply
illuminating account of the mass media as a self-sustaining
techno-cultural system that absorbs the whole of human life into a
virtual world of willfulness and unreality. Like Plato in his Myth of
the Cave, he calls for each of us to turn away from flickering images
and toward realities. We need to heed that call. --James Kalb: author of The Tyranny of Liberalism and Against Inclusiveness
Addicted to Distraction by Bruce G Charlton is a brilliant, pithy, and incisive analysis and condemnation of the modern mass media and its semipurposeful agenda of permanent revolution, permanent hysteria, and permanent chaos. His comments are as cutting as the scalpel of a surgeon performing an autopsy, and his insights a bright and clear as the merciless lights in an operating theater. Can a fish drown? Can it even notice the waters in which it lives and moves? No more than can we notice the totalitarian relativism of the modern mass media. The Mass Media is a roaring, grinding attention-grabbing machine which operates with no set purpose; except the purpose to subvert, uncreate, mock and destroy. It does not matter what the media destroys. Pointless subversion is the point of the media, and the medium is the message. By all means read and understand this book ... and then go out by yourself into the calm and silent wilderness for a year. --John C Wright, author and Nebula Award finalist
Addicted to Distraction by Bruce G Charlton is a brilliant, pithy, and incisive analysis and condemnation of the modern mass media and its semipurposeful agenda of permanent revolution, permanent hysteria, and permanent chaos. His comments are as cutting as the scalpel of a surgeon performing an autopsy, and his insights a bright and clear as the merciless lights in an operating theater. Can a fish drown? Can it even notice the waters in which it lives and moves? No more than can we notice the totalitarian relativism of the modern mass media. The Mass Media is a roaring, grinding attention-grabbing machine which operates with no set purpose; except the purpose to subvert, uncreate, mock and destroy. It does not matter what the media destroys. Pointless subversion is the point of the media, and the medium is the message. By all means read and understand this book ... and then go out by yourself into the calm and silent wilderness for a year. --John C Wright, author and Nebula Award finalist
3 comments:
It is a great book. The version I bought from Amazon (I believe there's only one) was very well bound and formatted.
Thanks Ben!
It's has 32,OOO views at the blog, which is a lot more visibility than most publishers could create.
Thought Prison, published three years earlier than AtD, has had 54K views, so maybe that should count as the 'reader's favourite' - so far?
Loved thought prison. Perhaps the only decent book or even article that I have succeeded in finding on the subject of political correctness. Can anyone recommend any others?
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