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alex_ellermann's review against another edition
1.0
I hated this book.
I'd call it pretentious, but late author Daniel J. Boorstin was a Librarian of Congress; a winner of the Pulitzer, Bancroft, Parkman, Dexter, and Watson Davis prizes; Director of the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution; Morton Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago; Harvard summa cum laude; Yale Ph.D.; and "double first" Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford. It isn't pretension if you have the resume to back it up. So I'll just call it snobbish.
In this book, first published in 1961, Boorstin explores not just pseudo-events, but artifice in all its forms. I'm there for his elucidation of the concept of the pseudo-event (loosely defined as events such as news conferences and photo-ops: events designed to create news and shape perception, rather than reflect events already underway). However, he takes his book to places I can't follow; places that seem, loosely speaking, like an old man yelling at clouds.
Boorstin derides celebrity culture with all the venom of the distinguished academic who must cede the limelight to vacuous people with great hair. He derides then-modern travel with all the superiority of the man who could afford tickets on a luxury liner and despairs of having to rub shoulders with the hoi polloi while contemplating art in the Louvre. Speaking of art, he derides prints and reproductions with the snobbishness of the man who has seen the real thing. And don't get him started on music. Or film. Or books. Or, well, anything that seems to have come into vogue after he passed the age of thirty.
Well, up yours, pal. People have always been attracted to and interested in beautiful people. Get over it. Furthermore, I grew up much closer to the bottom of America's socioeconomic ladder than the top. There was no luxury liner in my future, but the democratization of travel (which the author derides) opened Europe to me, anyway. There were no art galleries or symphonies in the small town where I grew up, but I could conceive a love for art and music thanks to the prints and records Boorstin so casually derides as pale imitations of the real thing. And don't get me started on his opinion of those who would presume to read the works of the Greeks and Romans without first learning Greek and Latin. I'm staggered by this guy's elitism. I'm getting angry all over again, just thinking about this book.
To be fair, Boorstin's deconstruction of advertising and political theater is as relevant today as it was in 1961. However, those elements aren't enough to rescue this book. As a beneficiary of the democratization of travel, art, music, philosophy, and literature which Boorstin so abhors, allow me to put my M.A. with Highest Distinction to work by saying "Get bent, Daniel J. Boorstin. And take your book with you."
I'd call it pretentious, but late author Daniel J. Boorstin was a Librarian of Congress; a winner of the Pulitzer, Bancroft, Parkman, Dexter, and Watson Davis prizes; Director of the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution; Morton Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago; Harvard summa cum laude; Yale Ph.D.; and "double first" Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford. It isn't pretension if you have the resume to back it up. So I'll just call it snobbish.
In this book, first published in 1961, Boorstin explores not just pseudo-events, but artifice in all its forms. I'm there for his elucidation of the concept of the pseudo-event (loosely defined as events such as news conferences and photo-ops: events designed to create news and shape perception, rather than reflect events already underway). However, he takes his book to places I can't follow; places that seem, loosely speaking, like an old man yelling at clouds.
Boorstin derides celebrity culture with all the venom of the distinguished academic who must cede the limelight to vacuous people with great hair. He derides then-modern travel with all the superiority of the man who could afford tickets on a luxury liner and despairs of having to rub shoulders with the hoi polloi while contemplating art in the Louvre. Speaking of art, he derides prints and reproductions with the snobbishness of the man who has seen the real thing. And don't get him started on music. Or film. Or books. Or, well, anything that seems to have come into vogue after he passed the age of thirty.
Well, up yours, pal. People have always been attracted to and interested in beautiful people. Get over it. Furthermore, I grew up much closer to the bottom of America's socioeconomic ladder than the top. There was no luxury liner in my future, but the democratization of travel (which the author derides) opened Europe to me, anyway. There were no art galleries or symphonies in the small town where I grew up, but I could conceive a love for art and music thanks to the prints and records Boorstin so casually derides as pale imitations of the real thing. And don't get me started on his opinion of those who would presume to read the works of the Greeks and Romans without first learning Greek and Latin. I'm staggered by this guy's elitism. I'm getting angry all over again, just thinking about this book.
To be fair, Boorstin's deconstruction of advertising and political theater is as relevant today as it was in 1961. However, those elements aren't enough to rescue this book. As a beneficiary of the democratization of travel, art, music, philosophy, and literature which Boorstin so abhors, allow me to put my M.A. with Highest Distinction to work by saying "Get bent, Daniel J. Boorstin. And take your book with you."
larryc's review against another edition
5.0
The Image is a modern classic of sociology first published in 1961. Anyone reading it today will probably be struck by how Boorstin identifies trends that are so prevalent today -especially the way society is fixated on images rather than the underlying reality.
Some might call Boorstin prescient but it's more accurate to say that he was an astute observer of what was already happening in the mid-20th century as the era of television was making sweeping changes in society. The paperback copy I picked up is a 25th-anniversary edition, with an introduction from the author and an afterword by conservative cultural critic George Will, written in 1987. So reading this today is like a time machine with multiple stops. For in the 1980s, the internet was still a decade in the future but the MTV era was well underway.
This is one of two influential books from the 1960s that deals with a similar topic, the other being Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord. The latter is still on my reading list and from browsing through it in used bookstores I expect it to be the more challenging of the two, as European philosophers can be rather abstract. By contrast, Daniel Boorstin writes in the straightforward manner of an American traditionalist.
The subtitle of this book tells a great deal of the story: "A guide to pseudo-events in America." Boorstin is obsessed with the phrase "pseudo-event" and it's used throughout the book. A pseudo-event is something that's contrived, such as a press conference or publicity shoot as opposed to a happening that occurs spontaneously. Boorstin's main point is that society is increasingly made up of pseudo-events. When you think that he wrote this some half century before the advent of reality TV and social media, it's quite amazing.
The Image recounts trends that are so familiar now that we barely notice them but that was just getting underway in the mid-20th century, such as the staged quality of presidential campaigns and debates and celebrity product endorsements.
Speaking of celebrities, Boorstin may have been one of the first to thoroughly examine and critique the whole idea. Celebrities, he notes, have largely supplanted heroes. While heroes are known for their character and great feats, celebrities are famous for being famous. As Boorstin puts it, "a celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knowness." This is something that people started to note with the rise of the celebrities such as Paris Hilton and the Kardashians in the early 21st century. Apparently, however, it dates back quite a bit before that. Boorstin explores the case of Charles Lindbergh at length, seeing his story as one of the first truly modern celebrities. Lindbergh was initially a hero in the traditional sense after making the first nonstop solo flight from New York to Paris. However, he quickly turned into a mere celebrity whose every movement was reported. When his baby was kidnapped, speculations and rumors filled the media for many months.
One of the most interesting chapters is "From Traveler to Tourist: the Lost Art of Travel," which describes the emergence of another major trend as modern mass tourism supplanted the age of leisurely travel. Boorstin and other cultural critics look on with horror as cruise ships, commercial airlines, hotel chains, and the emerging American highway system do away with differences and bring about the modern, increasingly homogenized world. Boorstin explains how tourism has created a whole new category of pseudo-events, such as museums and other attractions set up solely to entertain tourists and native dances and rituals performed outside of their original context and reimagined as entertainment.
Of course, a lot of what Boorstin is analyzing here, especially in the chapter about travel but also throughout the book, is about a world that's increasingly populated, educated, and democratic. He explicitly mentions that prior to the 20th century, long-distance travel was mostly limited to the wealthy.
He similarly complains about the phenomenon of bestsellers, which are books that are considered great because they sell well. As with travel, however, there's also the underlying issue of more people reading and buying books than ever before. The mass appeal of books began when mass printing became possible and literacy rates increased.
In all fields, there tends to be a trade-off between quality and mass participation. As more people than ever before read, travel, vote and participate in politics, watch TV and movies, and otherwise partake of culture, and at the same time technology accelerates, more events and items take on a mass-produced quality.
As Boorstin also laments, works of art were once all unique. Now, anyone can buy a poster, postcard or other reproduction of any painting. This is yet another example of where we have the advantage of widespread access versus the decline in quality and, perhaps, appreciation. while it's nice to be able to get a refrigerator magnet featuring Van Gogh's Starry Night, the very ease of acquiring such things necessarily takes away some of their magic).
According to the bio at the conclusion of the book (which was obviously added post-1987), Boorstin died in 2004, just at the cusp of the next development of the image in culture. For as Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram have taken off, images have quickly come to dominate the internet. Although Boorstin may never have seen a selfie, I doubt if he'd be surprised as it's the next logical step in everything he was describing.
The Image is a kind of reactionary critique and rant on a single topic, albeit an important one. Like many thinkers trying to prove a very broad point, Boorstin may take his argument too far in some cases. He tries to draw sharp divisions between hero and celebrity, real events and pseudo-events and images and ideals. I'm not sure it's quite so straightforward. Plato's Socratic dialogues, written more than 2000 years ago, largely dealt with the difference between appearance and reality. In fact, it's almost surprising that Boorstin doesn't mention Plato's Allegory of the Cave, which has enjoyed a resurgence of popularity recently. Plato discusses how shadows, or images, are mistaken as reality by the ignorant masses. Perhaps Boorstin doesn't reference this classic because it would have undercut his thesis, namely that The Image is a relatively modern phenomenon.
While the forces Boorstin identifies in The Image may not be as starkly new as he supposes, they certainly accelerated greatly in his time and even more so in our current time. I often find it instructive to read sociological viewpoints from earlier decades to see how modern trends got started. In the case of The Image, we're dealing with one of the central issues of our time. For even if images were an issue as far back as Plato's time, they certainly didn't dominate the everyday consciousness of people as they do now.
This is a complex issue and, as much as I enjoyed reading The Image, I don't think it really does much good to simply rail against cultural trends. Today we have a host of anti-internet critics who are telling us how current technology is dumbing everyone down. While they have a point, there are other ways to look at it as well.
Images are only getting more central to our existence. Does this mean we're sinking further into the realm of Plato's cave dwellers, the Maya of Buddhism or perhaps the complacent citizens of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World? Perhaps. However, there are always multiple ways to look at everything. There can be truth and beauty in images as well.
Whatever your opinion, The Image is well worth reading for its insights and historical perspective.
Some might call Boorstin prescient but it's more accurate to say that he was an astute observer of what was already happening in the mid-20th century as the era of television was making sweeping changes in society. The paperback copy I picked up is a 25th-anniversary edition, with an introduction from the author and an afterword by conservative cultural critic George Will, written in 1987. So reading this today is like a time machine with multiple stops. For in the 1980s, the internet was still a decade in the future but the MTV era was well underway.
This is one of two influential books from the 1960s that deals with a similar topic, the other being Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord. The latter is still on my reading list and from browsing through it in used bookstores I expect it to be the more challenging of the two, as European philosophers can be rather abstract. By contrast, Daniel Boorstin writes in the straightforward manner of an American traditionalist.
The subtitle of this book tells a great deal of the story: "A guide to pseudo-events in America." Boorstin is obsessed with the phrase "pseudo-event" and it's used throughout the book. A pseudo-event is something that's contrived, such as a press conference or publicity shoot as opposed to a happening that occurs spontaneously. Boorstin's main point is that society is increasingly made up of pseudo-events. When you think that he wrote this some half century before the advent of reality TV and social media, it's quite amazing.
The Image recounts trends that are so familiar now that we barely notice them but that was just getting underway in the mid-20th century, such as the staged quality of presidential campaigns and debates and celebrity product endorsements.
Speaking of celebrities, Boorstin may have been one of the first to thoroughly examine and critique the whole idea. Celebrities, he notes, have largely supplanted heroes. While heroes are known for their character and great feats, celebrities are famous for being famous. As Boorstin puts it, "a celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knowness." This is something that people started to note with the rise of the celebrities such as Paris Hilton and the Kardashians in the early 21st century. Apparently, however, it dates back quite a bit before that. Boorstin explores the case of Charles Lindbergh at length, seeing his story as one of the first truly modern celebrities. Lindbergh was initially a hero in the traditional sense after making the first nonstop solo flight from New York to Paris. However, he quickly turned into a mere celebrity whose every movement was reported. When his baby was kidnapped, speculations and rumors filled the media for many months.
One of the most interesting chapters is "From Traveler to Tourist: the Lost Art of Travel," which describes the emergence of another major trend as modern mass tourism supplanted the age of leisurely travel. Boorstin and other cultural critics look on with horror as cruise ships, commercial airlines, hotel chains, and the emerging American highway system do away with differences and bring about the modern, increasingly homogenized world. Boorstin explains how tourism has created a whole new category of pseudo-events, such as museums and other attractions set up solely to entertain tourists and native dances and rituals performed outside of their original context and reimagined as entertainment.
Of course, a lot of what Boorstin is analyzing here, especially in the chapter about travel but also throughout the book, is about a world that's increasingly populated, educated, and democratic. He explicitly mentions that prior to the 20th century, long-distance travel was mostly limited to the wealthy.
He similarly complains about the phenomenon of bestsellers, which are books that are considered great because they sell well. As with travel, however, there's also the underlying issue of more people reading and buying books than ever before. The mass appeal of books began when mass printing became possible and literacy rates increased.
In all fields, there tends to be a trade-off between quality and mass participation. As more people than ever before read, travel, vote and participate in politics, watch TV and movies, and otherwise partake of culture, and at the same time technology accelerates, more events and items take on a mass-produced quality.
As Boorstin also laments, works of art were once all unique. Now, anyone can buy a poster, postcard or other reproduction of any painting. This is yet another example of where we have the advantage of widespread access versus the decline in quality and, perhaps, appreciation. while it's nice to be able to get a refrigerator magnet featuring Van Gogh's Starry Night, the very ease of acquiring such things necessarily takes away some of their magic).
According to the bio at the conclusion of the book (which was obviously added post-1987), Boorstin died in 2004, just at the cusp of the next development of the image in culture. For as Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram have taken off, images have quickly come to dominate the internet. Although Boorstin may never have seen a selfie, I doubt if he'd be surprised as it's the next logical step in everything he was describing.
The Image is a kind of reactionary critique and rant on a single topic, albeit an important one. Like many thinkers trying to prove a very broad point, Boorstin may take his argument too far in some cases. He tries to draw sharp divisions between hero and celebrity, real events and pseudo-events and images and ideals. I'm not sure it's quite so straightforward. Plato's Socratic dialogues, written more than 2000 years ago, largely dealt with the difference between appearance and reality. In fact, it's almost surprising that Boorstin doesn't mention Plato's Allegory of the Cave, which has enjoyed a resurgence of popularity recently. Plato discusses how shadows, or images, are mistaken as reality by the ignorant masses. Perhaps Boorstin doesn't reference this classic because it would have undercut his thesis, namely that The Image is a relatively modern phenomenon.
While the forces Boorstin identifies in The Image may not be as starkly new as he supposes, they certainly accelerated greatly in his time and even more so in our current time. I often find it instructive to read sociological viewpoints from earlier decades to see how modern trends got started. In the case of The Image, we're dealing with one of the central issues of our time. For even if images were an issue as far back as Plato's time, they certainly didn't dominate the everyday consciousness of people as they do now.
This is a complex issue and, as much as I enjoyed reading The Image, I don't think it really does much good to simply rail against cultural trends. Today we have a host of anti-internet critics who are telling us how current technology is dumbing everyone down. While they have a point, there are other ways to look at it as well.
Images are only getting more central to our existence. Does this mean we're sinking further into the realm of Plato's cave dwellers, the Maya of Buddhism or perhaps the complacent citizens of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World? Perhaps. However, there are always multiple ways to look at everything. There can be truth and beauty in images as well.
Whatever your opinion, The Image is well worth reading for its insights and historical perspective.
louiselindqvist's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
2.0
gdigiacomo's review against another edition
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
4.5
mirandahale's review against another edition
4.0
Only a little bit dated. Very informative and easy to read.
meganzc's review against another edition
4.0
As we Americans obsess over fake news and alternative facts in the wake of Trump's presidential election, Daniel Boorstin's 55 year-old reflection on the proliferation of "pseudo-events" in American life reminds us that "fake" is a spectrum, and we're very nearly blind to all but the most extreme end. Here, Boorstin awakens us to the artifice of press conferences, debates, opinion polls, leaks, etc. etc. which we now generally accept as "real" news.
If this book were written today, it would almost surely fall to our contemporary pressure to present solutions with any societal critique. Boorstin refuses, and in fact insists that any attempt to expose pseudo-events only results in reinforcing them. "One of our grand illusions is our belief in a 'cure.' There is no cure," he states with depressing fatalism. By the end of the book, that fatalism feels well founded. 55 years later, the societal patterns he recognizes are all the more entrenched.
The afterword by Douglass Rushkoff is more optimistic:
If Rushkoff were writing this in the 90s, when the internet was still heavily text, I might forgive him his naïveté. But he wrote this in 2012, more than five years after LonelyGirl15, psuedo-event par excellence. Now, five years later, the image factory has produced President Macho Camacho Trump.
Still, there is room to critique Boorstin's critique. When he derides artificial modern tourism compared to the lost art of travel, he quickly dismisses the advantage of increased access, since the form of travel he praises can only (practically-speaking) be available to the fantastically wealthy. I would be more willing to follow along if he were more willing to admit he is extolling the virtues of aristocracy over democracy. I actually tend to agree with him that we often praise "progress" without admitting what we've left behind, but I think this book falls into the opposite pattern: lamenting all we've left behind without acknowledging the disadvantages we've overcome.
Boorstin also presents a critique of "celebrity" compared to "hero," which is all well and good, except he fails to explain why the "hero" is such a valuable social concept. It's not just that Boorstin believes pure-celebrities (like Zsa Zsa Gabor in his time and Paris Hilton in ours) are less worthy of attention than truly heroic types. He also criticizes the fact that we now want to humanize our heroes and recognize their flaws. I have trouble understanding why we would want idealized heroes rather than human ones. Isn't it recognition of human complexity a good thing? I suspect that my point of view here is a product of my times and that Boorstin would have an interesting answer. Sadly, he doesn't even try to justify the value of idealized heroes over human ones. It's as though he thinks the answer is so obvious it need not be explained.
Boorstin writes towards the end, "...we mark the boundaries of our world with a wall of mirrors," and I cannot help but interpret it literally:
Infinity psuedo-events reflected in Infinity Mirrors.
If this book were written today, it would almost surely fall to our contemporary pressure to present solutions with any societal critique. Boorstin refuses, and in fact insists that any attempt to expose pseudo-events only results in reinforcing them. "One of our grand illusions is our belief in a 'cure.' There is no cure," he states with depressing fatalism. By the end of the book, that fatalism feels well founded. 55 years later, the societal patterns he recognizes are all the more entrenched.
The afterword by Douglass Rushkoff is more optimistic:
What he [Boorstin] may not have realized, however, is the extent to which the emergence of peer-to-peer networking technologies may eventually challenge the preeminence of the image factory from which he recoiled.
If Rushkoff were writing this in the 90s, when the internet was still heavily text, I might forgive him his naïveté. But he wrote this in 2012, more than five years after LonelyGirl15, psuedo-event par excellence. Now, five years later, the image factory has produced President Macho Camacho Trump.
Still, there is room to critique Boorstin's critique. When he derides artificial modern tourism compared to the lost art of travel, he quickly dismisses the advantage of increased access, since the form of travel he praises can only (practically-speaking) be available to the fantastically wealthy. I would be more willing to follow along if he were more willing to admit he is extolling the virtues of aristocracy over democracy. I actually tend to agree with him that we often praise "progress" without admitting what we've left behind, but I think this book falls into the opposite pattern: lamenting all we've left behind without acknowledging the disadvantages we've overcome.
Boorstin also presents a critique of "celebrity" compared to "hero," which is all well and good, except he fails to explain why the "hero" is such a valuable social concept. It's not just that Boorstin believes pure-celebrities (like Zsa Zsa Gabor in his time and Paris Hilton in ours) are less worthy of attention than truly heroic types. He also criticizes the fact that we now want to humanize our heroes and recognize their flaws. I have trouble understanding why we would want idealized heroes rather than human ones. Isn't it recognition of human complexity a good thing? I suspect that my point of view here is a product of my times and that Boorstin would have an interesting answer. Sadly, he doesn't even try to justify the value of idealized heroes over human ones. It's as though he thinks the answer is so obvious it need not be explained.
Boorstin writes towards the end, "...we mark the boundaries of our world with a wall of mirrors," and I cannot help but interpret it literally:
Infinity psuedo-events reflected in Infinity Mirrors.
drakonreads's review against another edition
informative
reflective
medium-paced
3.5
Really interesting, even in 2021; my rating would be higher but there was something that kept grating on me. It gives me the "in the good old days..." vibe which for me raised some flags about bias which in turn made it hard for me to enjoy it at times (his tone even makes increased literacy sounds like it's a bad thing. Though it may be because he lumped it in with all the other technology...).
His main thesis is still relevant: pseudo-events are increasingly being created instead of the actual thing. Celebrities are celebrated for their wellknowness, while heroes are in decline*.
*see my point? Also, the "heroes" is a whole other discussion on what heroes are, and how they are just a polished version of a person's reputation; so, I have a hard time separating the two and so to me it undermines his point.
Overall, it's an informative and interesting book covering various elements of the Graphic Revolution and various technologies (books, digests, films, and so on). It was the just the "in my day" vibe that annoyed me because there are some parts where I see his bias (like the 'hero', and 'ideals' points he makes), otherwise it's a good book.
*see my point? Also, the "heroes" is a whole other discussion on what heroes are, and how they are just a polished version of a person's reputation; so, I have a hard time separating the two and so to me it undermines his point.
Overall, it's an informative and interesting book covering various elements of the Graphic Revolution and various technologies (books, digests, films, and so on). It was the just the "in my day" vibe that annoyed me because there are some parts where I see his bias (like the 'hero', and 'ideals' points he makes), otherwise it's a good book.