Long-term followers of IN THE DARK (there ARE a few, you know) will remember that my blog productivity drops whenever I'm working on a book, as it did with The Metaphysics of Media (which won the Lewis Mumford Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Technics for 2010) and Why the Irish Speak English (Winner of the Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in the Field of Media Ecology for 2007).
So my output on IN THE DARK has been pretty spare in the last year or so as I worked on my third book, a collection of essays titled Cultural Defiance, Cultural Deviance. CD/CD is a set of ten essays I've written over several years, some written as peer-reviewed articles and presentations, some written as nothing more than flights of imagination, but all with a nod to the notion that, if reality is a socially-constructed phenomenon, we ought to have a hand in the process and not out-source that construction to multi-national infotainment corporations.
While CD/CD is out only a week, it has garnered some praise from early reviewers:
To the names of McLuhan, Postman,
Ellul, and Ong, please now add Peter K. Fallon.
This isn’t so much a book as it is a placeholder for polymaths. This isn’t a collection of essays unified by
a theme or subject, but rather a collection of discrete objects subjected to
the same methodology. They are
historical, analogical, probing, semantic, linguistic, and psychological. And not religious but spiritual, in the best
sense of that beaten dead horse… If you read the essays collected herein, even
some of them, you will have committed the cultural heresy of the title. You will have committed the act of
contemplation, in defiance of the noise, rush, bright colors, and distraction
from the unmitigated disaster of technological society’s clustercuss all around
you. And that will be a deviant thing to
do. –ReadMercer Schuchardt, Wheaton College (from the Foreword)
Neil Postman suggested that all of
the social and behavioral sciences would be best understood as a form of moral
theology. Without a doubt, he would have heartily approved of this well-written
and thoughtful collection of essays by Peter K Fallon, who writes in the
tradition of Jacques Ellul, Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan, and Postman himself,
and brings deep insight, grounded in the media ecology intellectual tradition,
coupled with a sharp wielding of ethical criteria, to matters of contemporary
and universal human concern. – Lance Strate, Professor of Communication and
Media Studies, Fordham University
Both a student of renowned
Communications theorist Neil Postman and the winner of the Media Ecology
Association's Lewis Mumford Award (named for Postman’s own intellectual hero),
Peter K. Fallon is the perfect tour guide through our techno-mediated environment.
He adheres scrupulously to Postman's conception of media ecology as nothing
less than an exploration of the ways in which our communication habits and
technologies enhance or impede our chances for survival… In the words and
spirit of Jacques Ellul--one of the intellectual heirs Fallon pays homage to in
the book--"Contemplation as Defiance/Deviance" is "a call to the
sleeper to awake." – Eric Goodman, Producer, Composer,
Performer: Thus Spoke the Spectacle
For nearly two decades, Peter K.
Fallon worked for NBC News. Today, he is a media scholar and a powerful critic
of the television he once produced… These essays by a writer of conscience and
acute observation insist on the continuity between our media and our moral
lives. Fallon’s evident passion for the potential of media, and his pointed
criticisms of the moments when television and other media betray their promise,
affect all who read his thoughtful books. – Anne-Marie Cusac, George Polk
Award-winning investigative journalist; author, Cruel and Unusual: The
Culture of Punishment in America
Here is a link to some quotes from the book on Goodreads, and here is the table of contents:
Thanks for reading.
