The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties

In his latest book, The Democratic Surround , the media historian Fred Turner asks not what Democracy might mean, as several political theorists have done in recent years, but just who the democratic citizen Americans envision might be and how their conception of that individual was formulated. Beginning in the late 1930s with a brief, fascinating account of Americans’ distrust of the technologies of mass communication—a distrust sparked, in many ways, by European fascists’ apparent use of films and radio broadcasts to turn populations into mindless followers—Turner chronicles a cultural response that looked to use open-ended media installations to foster a contrasting, productive individualism