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Title: Unreality Industry: The Deliberate Manufacturing of Falsehood and What It Is Doing to Our Lives by Ian I. Mitroff, Warren Bennis ISBN: 1-55972-014-X Publisher: Carol Publishing Corporation Pub. Date: 01 September, 1989 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.95

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Average Customer Rating: 3.8 (5 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: Feelin' the Late 'Eighties Burnout...
Comment: Mitroff and Bennis' _The Unreality Industry_ is about the nature of unreality and how the manufacturing of unreality is taking over America. Needless to state, TV is the primary medium of unreality, with the disconnected, a-historical context which it presents its news and entertainment material. The authors take care to outline the dichotomy between reality and unreality. Reality is very difficult to understand, is stressful to deal with, and only increases in its complexity. Unreality is simple, mindless, and creates the illusion (computer games, movies) of some kind of control over one's surroundings. Our embrace of unreality as a means of escape from the harshness and confounding nature of reality is deeply rooted in US culture: bigger is better, the infallibility of science and technology, the veneration of "progress". One aspect of unreality is that it employs "boundary warping" to catch the audience's attention. "Boundary warping" entails the near complete destruction of rational thought processes and categorization, the lack of any organization and coherence. The MTV music video is where "boundary warping" will find its most unadulterated manifestation--brightness, quick movement, lack of central focus, erotic images, disconnected and apocalyptic themes. It is often difficult to differentiate between male and female for instance and some androgyny or hybrid concoction is the norm (sounds like Gnostic Gnostalgia to me, but the book doesn't take the analysis that far). Another phenomenon that figures in unreality the commercialized, systematized and industrialized manufacture of celebrities. They have a mass-market appeal for various audiences, such as movie stars, sports figures, political parties, etc. The entertainment industry uses archetypes to sell its products as well. Archetypes, the primal images and ideas that unite humanity embodied in fairy tales, religions and myths, are constantly being re-hashed into different combinations to create stereotypical programming for the masses. The US is increasingly becoming a "leaderless" society, with true leadership replaced by managerial and bureaucratic ability. A chapter is devoted to the "Metaphysics of Sappiness" i.e., the dummying-down of society and discourse between people. With the advent of the electronic age, when people get together in large groups, it is usually for the purpose of entertaining each other rather than for intellectual conversation. In all, the authors seem to support the idea that the masses are not able to tolerate sustained inquiry, however, they warn against the trap of becoming too pessimistic. Obviously, this subject matter is going to arouse some controversy, and the authors pre-empt the criticism. They explicitly state in their introduction that their study in _The Unreality Industry_ would be one of a moral argument rather than one of dispassionate objectivity. Perhaps it can be said that Mitroff (a Ph.D. in engineering) and Bennis (a Ph.D. in economics from MIT) are two eggheads distasteful of the lack of more cultured programming (they like _Masterpiece Theatre_ for example). But in all, this book was written in 1989--the end of the Eighties. What did come out of the Eighties? Reaganomics, yuppies, video games, Madonna, Gorbechev, crack, hair-bands? _The Unreality Industry_ is late-Eighties burnout, pure and simple, and as we just wrapped up the Nineties a couple years ago, the idea that unreality is in total control is more relevant than ever.

Rating: 4
Summary: Media Revealed
Comment: Ian Mitroff and Warren Bennis are two academics heavily involved in the technological revolution. Their purpose in writing this book is to examine how technology, in what they call the "systems age," has created an all-consuming cocoon of unreality in our daily lives. They are not bashing technology, but examining how a lack of ethics has allowed technology to threaten the very nature of our system of government and of our lives. There are plenty of books available on media studies: Todd Gitlin, Jerry Mander, Neil Postman, and others; what makes this book different, at least in the eyes of the authors, is that it studies the underlying causes of the effects of television and mass media. This underlying effect is the creation of unreality, or a system that is so all consuming that it blocks out the real world.

The problem with an omnipresent unreality is that the real reality has not gone away. One of the reasons we create an unreality is that the real world is far too complex to understand. In the modern world, the interdependence of every aspect of global life has led to a complexity that is simply astonishing to behold. Not one human being on the face of the Earth can make heads or tails of events anymore. The result is fear on the part of humans, which leads to the creation of an alternate, unreal world where answers are easy and presented in a somewhat non-threatening way (I'm not sure this is right; the media loves to start panics). This alternate world has become so pervasive that it has become an actual industry, generating celebrities and images that people can relate to.

How celebrity is created and marketed is probably the best part of the book. The authors use charts and graphs to show how this process has become a huge industry employing thousands and thousands of people. The book also shows how the masses react to this celebrity, which in extreme cases, leads to the likes of Jonestown and Mark David Chapman. Celebrityhood is revealed to be a process of engineering; people are "remade" to fit personalities and molds demanded by the public (or is it really demanded by the public? Perhaps the demand is created.).

Other sections show how media uses archetypes from the human psyche to create shows, how heroes are generated in a society that lacks, or at least ignores, real heroes, and boundary warping, or how reality and unreality is actually defined.

This is a good book, although it is somewhat dated. Even the 1993 update makes this book pre-Internet, a new technology that would no doubt interest the authors. One of the charts uses characters from "Dynasty" as examples, and the reliance on Sigmund Freud shows that the authors are not aware that most psychologists view Freud as a quack. I think this is a necessary read, at least for those who are interested in media studies and the like. It does tend to get a little esoteric at times, which is not surprising as the two authors are engineers who are probably not used to writing directly to the masses. Recommended.

Rating: 1
Summary: Overdramaticized view of American Media
Comment: While I agree that the media has its share of problems and is advertising driven and needs to be carefully analyzed, the arguments these two authors use are completely blown out of proportion. Everyone knows that you can't believe what you see on TV. As for the advertisements that permeate their way into programs - I don't see why the authors don't realize television wouldn't survive without clever advertising to keep the cash rolling in. As long as you can differentiate between reality and TV, you're fine, and this book will shed no new light on anything for you.