Is Within the Context of No Context one of the All-TIME 100 Best Nonfiction Books? TIME thinks so. Check it out.

Within the Context of No Context

By James Poniewozik | August 30, 2011 | +

Author: George W.S. Trow

Year Released: 1980

What made George W.S. Trow’s 1981 book a brilliant critique of television was that it was also a critique of the television audience and a world that was shaping itself in imitation of television. TV, the New Yorker essayist argued, had erased the traditional contexts and associations that had given life order and replaced them with a temporary, arbitrary, relativistic “no-context.” Where people once belonged to cultures, they were now audiences; where there was once history, there was now a random succession of events and images; where there were once tribes, there were now only the mass and the individual. Trow’s book — epigrammatic, more prose poem than editorial — is a kind of channel-surfing experience: you can almost hear the click of a remote control as it shifts from observation to observation. And though Trow wrote in a different media era of three big networks, Within the Context of No Context proves prescient about TV’s future: “The lie of television has been that there are contexts to which television will grant an access. Since lies last, usually, no more than one generation, television will re-form around the idea that television itself is a context to which television will grant an access.” Who wants to watch the Survivor reunion episode?

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Related Topics: George W.S. Trow, Within the Context of No Context

Melissa

Reblogged this on Swamp of Boredom and commented:
I’m reblogging this for my own reference and also to share with my readers (all 34 of you;)). Since the release of the 1001 Books App on Tuesday, I’ve been book list crazy. Since I like non-fiction – especially non-fiction centered on historical events and people, not so much current people – and have read a couple of excellent non-fiction books in the last year (Only Yesterday, Empire of the Summer Moon) I wondered if there was a list of recommended non-fiction books. Of course there is. I found one from the Guardain (UK) that is, obviously, geared towards British readers and that, unlike Time’s list, encompasses all non-fiction ever written. This list from Time consists of books only since Time began publishing, 1923. There are a few that don’t interest me at all and the biography choices focus too heavily on women and African Americans, IMO, but overall the list is excellent.
Enjoy!