This is a collection of essays about the media, the environment, and the
whole of humanity at the brink of extinction. As the demands of
overpopulation and of an unsustainable consumer economy dry up existing
natural resources and destroy vital ecosystems that we need to survive,
the corporate-controlled media saturate worldwide audiences with a
barrage of hypnotic images and narratives to stimulate over-consumption
and to distract us from the consequences of rampant consumerism, while
remaining silent about the systematic destruction of the environment and
our future. Academicians from the across the sciences, the social
sciences, the arts, and the humanities engage in an interdisciplinary
discussion informed by a vision of an interconnected humanity and
focused on the role of the media in forging public discourse.
Contributors to the collection argue that today's media are failing
humanity. Rather than providing pictures of reality on which the world's
citizens can act, the corporate-controlled media are widely used as
instruments of commercial and political propaganda, creating an immense
web of images and narratives that their creators know to be not
true--fabrications designed to sell, to manipulate, in a sense to
enslave worldwide audiences. At the core of the discussion in this book
is a utopian vision of one unified humanity-billions of people whose
destinies and dreams are imbricated and interdependent, and who share
the same world, the same habitats. It is a vision of a world that
cherishes diversity but is also united-a world where our differences are
no longer a cause for conflict and where separate countries or separate
ethnic or religious communities no longer have to compete or wage war to
exploit available resources. As extensions of humans, the media can be
instruments of salvation instead of destruction, liberation instead of
oppression. But first, we must recognize the challenges we face.
