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Loading... The image : a guide to pseudo-events in America (original 1961; edition 1992)| 250 | None | 106,695 | 
(4.19) | 5 | First published in 1962, this wonderfully provocative book introduced the notion of "pseudo-events"--events such as press conferences and presidential debates, which are manufactured solely in order to be reported--and the contemporary definition of celebrity as "a person who is known for his well-knownness." Since then Daniel J. Boorstin's prophetic vision of an America inundated by its own illusions has become an essential resource for any reader who wants to distinguish the manifold deceptions of our culture from its few enduring truths.… (more) |
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| Epigraph |
Technology....the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it. - Max Frisch  | |
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| Dedication |
To The University of Chicago "a place of light, of liberty, and of learning" | |
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Introduction, Extravagant Expectations: In this book I describe the world of our making, how we have used our wealth, our literacy, our technology, and our progress, to create the ticket of unreality which stands between us and the facts of life. I, The simplest of our extravagant expectations concerns the amount of novelty in the world. | |
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Every day seeing there and hearing there takes the place of being there. One need not be a doctor to know he is sick, nor a shoemaker to feel the shoe pinch. I do not know what "reality" really is. But somehow I do know an illusion when I see one. When we pick up our newspaper at breakfast, we expect—we even demand—that it bring us momentous events since the night before. We turn on the car radio as we drive to work and expect "news" to have occurred since the morning newspaper went to press. Returning in the evening, we expect our house not only to shelter us, to keep us warm in winter and cool in summer, but to relax us, to dignify us, to encompass us with soft music and interesting hobbies, to be a playground, a theater, and a bar. We expect our two-week vacation to be romantic, exotic, cheap, and effortless. We expect a faraway atmosphere if we go to a nearby place; and we expect everything to be relaxing, sanitary and Americanized if we go to a faraway place. We expect new heroes every season, a literary masterpiece every month, a dramatic spectacular every week, a rare sensation every night. "The counsel on public relations," Mr. Bernays explains, "not only knows what news value is, but knowing it, he is in a position to make news happen. He is a creator of events." All around the world we have revealed a shift in our thinking from ideals to images. Each one of us must disenchant himself, must moderate his expectations, must prepare himself to receive messages coming in from the outside. The first step is to begin to suspect that there may be a world out there, beyond our present or future power to image or to imagine. We should not worry over how to export more of the American images among which we live. We should not try to persuade others to share our illusions. We should try to reach outside our images. We should seek new ways of letting messages reach us; from our own past, from God, from the world which we may hate or think we hate. To give visas to strange and alien and outside notions. | |
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The 1987 twenty-fifth anniversary edition (and later editions) includes a new "Foreword to the 25th Anniversary Edition" by the author and an afterword by George F. Will that the original 1961 edition does not have. | |
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▾References References to this work on external resources.  Wikipedia in English (6)
▾Book descriptions First published in 1962, this wonderfully provocative book introduced the notion of "pseudo-events"--events such as press conferences and presidential debates, which are manufactured solely in order to be reported--and the contemporary definition of celebrity as "a person who is known for his well-knownness." Since then Daniel J. Boorstin's prophetic vision of an America inundated by its own illusions has become an essential resource for any reader who wants to distinguish the manifold deceptions of our culture from its few enduring truths. ▾Library descriptions No library descriptions found. ▾LibraryThing members' description |
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