Media Virus!

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This provocative title suggests the author will follow the familiar route of explaining how popular culture manipulates its audience into complacency. On the contrary, Rushkoff (The GenX Reader) asserts that media ``viruses'' empower audiences both to become more actively engaged with the media and to challenge the status quo. Viruses, e.g., rap song ``Cop Killer'' and the videotape of the Rodney King beating, are controversial, compelling images or ideas that allow countercultural politics to infiltrate mainstream media. The hidden agendas Rushkoff explores here are thus subversive ones. His readings of various media outlets, such as TV shows like The Simpsons and Ren and Stimpy, as launchpads for antiestablishment messages about alternative lifestyles, are smart and interesting. But his conclusions about the revolutionary potential of media viruses are not always substantiated by his analyses, and his use of techno-jargon makes his arguments often difficult to follow. Author tour. (Oct.)

Library Journal

In our "datasphere" world, we are exposed to information about events like the O.J. Simpson case in myriad formats from newspapers, television tabloids, and talk shows to the Internet. This media world, according to critic Rushkoff (The Genx Reader, Ballantine, 1994), is the next and only frontier. He argues that the media operate in society as a virus causing permanent and real social change. While his excessive use of viral-related concepts gets tiresome, the thesis that the popular media manipulate American culture is provocative and well argued. In Rushkoff's view, the media world is not monolithic, and its power can be harnessed to serve a variety of purposes. To illustrate his point, he examines a range of media activities, from mainstream offerings, such as children's television with it subtle, subversive messages, to the tactical strategies employed by "camcorder kamikazes" documenting alternative versions of reality. This timely book should be of interest to a wide range of readers.-Judy Solberg, Univ. of Maryland Libs., College Park

Aaron Cohen

According to Rushkoff, subversion abounds in a contemporary, media-saturated culture loaded with insurrection-inducing phenomena that he calls "viruses." These include activist publicity pranks, such as those pulled by ecological guerrillas; issues seized upon by particular groups to promote certain agendas (e.g., the AIDS epidemic as manipulated by the religious right); and issue-laden incidents spread through technological innovations (e.g., Rodney King's beating on videotape) that hit raw nerves across the land. Moreover, Rushkoff shows that cartoons like "The Simpsons" contain tons of radical (perhaps leftist) messages, and, particularly provocatively, that the Internet and other parts of the datasphere are being put to revolutionary uses. He also brings up the important and underreported issue of First Amendment violations against underground cable TV and radio broadcasters. Despite his irritating tendency to lump too many people into a vaguely defined "GenX" category, "Media Virus!" obviously contains many ideas well worth considering, and fond words for Abbie Hoffman and Paul Krassner show that Rushkoff thinks his readers aren't all the so-called twentysomethings.