Table of Contents

Prologue: Defining Our Terms
Introduction
Part 1: Consciousness Technologies: The Environmental Properties of Drugs and Media
Chapter 1: Drugs: The Intensions of Humanity - Lance Strate
Chapter 2: Drugs as Environments: Being Inside What is Inside Us - Corey Anton
Chapter 3: Perceptual Amplifiers and Inhibitors: Some Parallels between Modern Media and Drug Use - Robert C. MacDougall
Part 2: Relationship and Identity Transformation: The Environmental Effects of Drugs and Media
Chapter 4: Sex-Drug Technologies: A Media Ecological Approach to Birth Control and ED Drugs -Valerie V. Peterson
Chapter 5: ED Drugs and the Re-making of the Real Man - Robert C. MacDougall
Chapter 6: Recreational Dubs: Constituting Apple's iPod Cult - Brett Robinson
Part 3: Selling Drugs, Pushing Media: Advertising, Consumption, Diagnostics and Dissemination
Chapter 7: Pediatric Bipolar and the Media of Madness- Jonah Bossewitch
Chapter 8: Treat her with Prozac: Four Decades of Direct-to-Physician Antidepressant Advertising -Cristina Hanganu-Bresch
Chapter 9: The Extended Pharmacist: Entering the Era of Remote Drug Dispensation and Pharmaceutical Counseling -Phil Rose and Ainsley Moore
Chapter 10: Media Peddlers, Pushers, and Pharmacists: Toward a Producer-Intention Model of the Media -Brecken Chinn Swartz
Part 4: Psychopharmacological Approaches to Understanding Communication Technology
Chapter 11: Media Ecological Psychopharmacosophy: An Ecology of Mind for Today -Ronan Hallowell
Chapter 12: Psychoactive Media -John P. Skinnon
Part 5: The Road Ahead
Chapter 13: Environmental Engineering for Ecological Balance - Robert C. MacDougall
Chapter 14: Epilogue: Epigenetics, Mirror Neurons, and a Few New Prescriptions on the Horizon - Robert MacDougall
List of Contributors
Index

Promotional Information

A groundbreaking collection of essays highlighting the links between contemporary society's over-reliance on both media and drugs.

About the Author

Robert MacDougall is a Professor of communication and media studies at Curry College on the outskirts of Boston, MA. He is an avid member of the Media Ecology Association, and continues to work toward articulating a biological approach to understand the human-technology interface. His most recent investigations incorporate the use of EEG technology in an effort to better understand some of the interactions, effects and side-effects associated with everyday multimedia use.

Reviews

Media addiction is quietly acknowledged but never discussed, for obvious reasons. It is a "dirty little secret" which could revolutionize every aspect of innovation and marketing if it were known. Such a revolution would have the most beneficial effects on preservation of culture and the easing of social and individual unrest...It gives the reader, for the first time, some means of ascertaining how media do and will affect his life and society and culture. --Eric Mcluhan, Independent Scholar and co-author of The Laws of Media

We all of course know the cliché 'don't judge a book by its cover.' But to anyone who is perusing this cover and reading this note, you would be well advised to heed the following extension of that cliché: 'Do not be too quick to judge this book by its title.' This is by no means a book about media like Cheech and Chong's movie Up in Smoke or Hunter S. Thompson's drug-addled journalistic endeavors, or what happens when music fans fuel up on Ecstasy and rave all night at a club. It is a book that takes on, in a deeply serious and scholarly way, the serious matters that: (a) drugs are media in that they come between us and our ways of being in and experiencing our world; (b) our uses of and gratifications from media in certain ways smack of and parallel the use of and addiction to drugs; and (c) both drugs and media operate on our consciousness at the same time our consciousness operates on them - in significant ways, for significant reasons, and with significant effects. --Thom Gencarelli, Associate Professor of Communication, Manhattan College