Bookshelf

All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes by Ken Myers. This book is about the impact of the forms of popular culture: TV, movies, and music. Myers argues that these forms favor a whole different kind of sensibility: immediate gratification over reflective reasoning. He is not saying that this is always sexual or violent, but emotional and non-linear.  Myers is the host of the Mars Hill Audio Journal--a bimonthly tape of interviews with culture watchers of various persuasions. 
Shows About Nothing: Nihilism in Popular Culture from The Exorcist to Seinfeld by Thomas Hibbs.  Hibbs argues that Nihilism [the view that there is no objective meaning to life] is "no longer wrestled with, instead it becomes an unspoken assumption. What is peculiar about the late twentieth century is the way meaninglessness has indeed become both a prevailing, if unremarked, supposition, and a fertile source of comedy." This book has great reviews of many of the popular films of the last ten years, such as Pulp Fiction and Silence of the Lambs, but without the reactionary moralistic critique. Hibbs instead engages the films at the level of their nihilism.
Amusing Ourselves to Death. Neil Postman. This book is about television and the way it has changed us. But its focus is not on what is on TV, but the way "a major new medium (television) changes the structure of discourse" and our understanding of what information and truth is. Postman believes the "epistemology [the way we know] created by television not only is inferior to a print-based epistemology but is dangerous..."  What he finds dangerous, among other things, is the way TV news is so image-based that it leaves the "information" without a context to understand it, yet people think they are informed about "world events". How will the church be heard with its emphasis on words in an entertainment-oriented culture?
Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology by Neil Postman. This is a very insightful book about the unintended consequences of technology and our uncritical mind toward technological advances. Postman writes that "The Technopoly story is without a moral center. It puts in its place efficiency, interest, and economic advance. It promises heaven on earth through the conveniences of technological progress. It casts aside all traditional narratives and symbols that suggest stability and orderliness and tells, instead, of a life of skills, technical expertise, and the ecstasy of consumption. Its purpose is to produce functionaries of an ongoing technopoly.” Like his Amusing Ourselves to Death, this book raises questions about how truth is perceived and the threat to people's reasoning abilities in an increasingly hi-tech culture like ours.