| Over the past thirty years, Don DeLillo (1936—) has made himself as one of the most important contemporary writers in the United States. White Noise, DeLillo's eighth novel, winner of the National Book Award in 1985, was claimed as DeLillo's"breakthrough"book shortly after its publication, and achieved commercial success. And White Noise has caused a lot of attention and critics, which are mainly about its themes of contemporary American society, such as consumerism, fear of death, family, environment, and so on. This thesis is a thematic study of White Noise and focuses on mass media and their destructive power upon modern people."Media, the plural form of medium, refers to those organized means of dissemination of fact, opinion, entertainment, and other information, such as newspapers, magazines, cinema films, radio, television, the World Wide Web, billboards, books, CDs, DVDs, videocassettes, computer games and other forms of publishing. Mass media is a term used to denote, as a category, that section of the media specifically conceived and designed to reach a very large audience, typically at least as large as the whole population of a nation state"(2008, Mar. 2nd). In White Noise, DeLillo tries to describe a striking picture of mass media's extreme popularity in people's daily life. Mass media saturate the whole world. The television in the living room, the newspaper on the doorstep, and the radio in the car are delivering all kinds of information to people. People spend a lot of time watching TV everyday. TV is always on to accompany people while they are eating, talking, reading, or even sleeping. Therefore, mass media have had great influence on people's psychology, behavior and values. The children of Jack and Babette from their previous marriages are TV addicts, thus they are greatly influenced by TV. They learn nearly everything from the TV. To them, the TV set is equal to the encyclopedia; therefore, they always do things under the instruction of TV. Not only are the children addicted to television, but the adults are also subject to the influence of television and other forms of mass media. Jack is fascinated with disasters on TV. Babette indulges herself in talk radio. Living in an age of mass media, the characters in the novel are numbed by the images offered by mass media, and become crazy for those violent scenes as an excitement to their numbed brains. And the worst thing that mass media can cause is a person's appealing to violent act. When people meet some frustrations in their real life, and they can not find a way out, they may easily turn to the mass media violence, which can offer them models, since they have already been numbed by the media violence. After Jack's exposure in the toxic air, his fear of death gets stronger. And especially when he knows the affairs between his wife and the medicine supplier, Mink, he can't take it anymore, thus he decides to murder Mink. He commits the crime step by step, which is just like the scenes shown on TV. Besides Jack, Tommy, another character in the novel, commits mass killing not only to relief himself from pressure but also to be famous on mass media.Mass media have become a part of people's life. They are so important tools that people can not live without them. However, people should always remind themselves that while making full use of mass media, they should know the negative effects or even destructive power of mass media.
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