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Mediated: How the Media Shapes Our World and the Way We Live in It

Mediated: How the Media Shapes Our World and the Way We Live in It
By Thomas de Zengotita

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In this utterly original look at our modern “culture of performance,” de Zengotita shows how media are creating self-reflective environments, custom made for each of us. From Princess Diana’s funeral to the prospect of mass terror, from oral sex in the Oval Office to cowboy politics in distant lands, from high school cliques to marital therapy, from blogs to reality TV to the Weather Channel, Mediated takes us on an original and astonishing tour of every department of our media-saturated society. The implications are personal and far-reaching at the same time.
Thomas de Zengotita is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine and holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University. He teaches at the Dalton School, and at the Draper Graduate Program at New York University.
Winner of the Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in the Field of Media Ecology
 
Just when it seemed there was nothing new to say about the media, along comes a book that transcends the conventional wisdom with an original vision—one that unites our most intimate personal concerns with far-reaching historical trends in an accessible way. From Princess Diana's funeral to the prospect of mass terror, from oral sex in the Oval Office to cowboy politics in different lands, from high school cliques to marital therapy, from the hip-hop nation to climbing Mt. Everest, from blogs to reality TV to the Weather Channel, Mediated takes on every last department of our media-saturated society. What emerges is a portrait of a populace immersed in options, surrounded by representations, driven to unprecedented levels of self-consciousness—and obligated by these circumstances to transform lives into performances.
"A fine roar of a lecture about how the American mind is shaped by (too much) media . . . De Zengotita . . . is an adventurer of the digitized American psyche."—The Washington Post Book World
"Mediated has the same liveliness and intense intellectuality as Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media, which is a way of saying there are anywhere from three to ten stimulating ideas on every page. As McLuhan presented us with the realization that modernism was coming to an end, so de Zengotita has a great deal to say about the saturation of postmodernism in our existence today. Let me offer my salute to Thomas de Zengotita."—Norman Mailer

"A fine roar of a lecture about how the American mind is shaped by (too much) media . . . De Zengotita . . . is an adventurer of the digitized American psyche."—The Washington Post Book World
 
"A spectacular widescreen critique of contemporary American culture."—The Christian Science Monitor
 
"Reading Thomas de Zengotita's Mediated is like spending time with a wild, wired friend, the kind who keeps you up late and lures you outside your comfort zone with a speed rap full of brilliant notions."—O, The Oprah Magazine
 
"If the world as we perceive it is made by, for, and of the media, Thomas de Zengotita is our Captain Cook and Christopher Columbus. He sets out to discover what we see and how we know and the result is a brilliant book, as entertaining as it is insightful."—Lewis Lapham, author of Waiting for the Barbarians

"A conversation with Thomas de Zengotita is about the most engaging and enlightening experience a thinking person can have. This book feels as natural and personal as having Tom in your own living room, drawing you out, considering your responses, and then bringing you to new levels of awareness. Here's a man who understands both the media and his medium so completely that the connections he makes across the vast landscapes of popular culture end up feeling like spontaneous discoveries by the reader. Invite Tom into your head and heart by all means, and try walking around the world really seeing for a while. You may decide to stay that way."—Douglas Rushoff, author of Media Virus! and ScreenAgers

"Read Thomas de Zengotita's Mediated for a brilliant reflection on postmodern culture and our peculiar, performing, contemporary selves and the media that make and reflect us. It's a great read, and you'll never feel the same about your kids, your friends, or yourself again."—Frances Fox Piven, author of Poor People’s Movements and The War at Home

"De Zengotita's style is both reflective and sardonic as he delves into the ways the media has shaped our individual reactions to modern culture and events. Influenced by the media-inspired 'culture of performance,' we now live our lives as if we are performers practicing method acting, he maintains. We go through the motions of expected reactions to everything from the 9/11 terrorist attacks to Princess Diana's death to documentaries of the Kennedy assassination and the civil rights movement. The Internet, satellite television, and a host of technological products and services now give us the impression of participating in current and historical events to such an extent that we can barely distinguish the varying levels of what de Zengotita categorizes as ranging from the real-real to the unreal-real. Analyzing car commercials, cell-phone usage, the social art of teenagers, and other aspects of modern culture, with keen detail and wit, de Zengotita offers an amazing look at how media affects our culture, our choices, and our responses to our media-filtered lives. Completely absorbing, amusing, and insightful."—Vanessa Bush, Booklist

"In a deceptively colloquial, intellectually dense style, de Zengotita posits that since the 1960s, Americans have belonged to a culture of reflexivity, and the media in all their forms have put us there. We're bombarded from childhood with so many images putting 'us'—the individual person—at the center of the universe that we cannot help thinking that this is where we belong. We live in a Times Square world, says the Harper's contributing editor, and thus we become the ultimate Descartesians: media think only of us, therefore we think only of ourselves. The result of this self-centeredness is that we become increasingly numbed by the bombardment of images and, in a variation on the 'if a tree falls in the woods' query, we can no longer imagine our premediated lives. Media imagery has given us an omniscient perspective—we can be on the grassy knoll, by the Twin Towers, on the beach as the tsunami hits—while never having to incur the horrors of being there. 'Mediation' inevitably closes us off to the unmediated world, home of those victims of the tsunami whose lives are hideously hard and where no media put them front and center. This provocative, extreme, and compelling work is a must-read for philosophers of every stripe."—Publishers Weekly

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #58601 in Books
  • Published on: 2006-02-21
  • Released on: 2006-02-21
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 304 pages

Features

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
In a deceptively colloquial, intellectually dense style, de Zengotita posits that since the 1960s, Americans have belonged to a culture of reflexivity, and the media in all their forms have put us there. We're bombarded from childhood with so many images putting "us"—the individual person—at the center of the universe that we cannot help thinking that this is where we belong. We live in a Times Square world, says the Harper's contributing editor, and thus we become the ultimate Descartesians: media think only of us, therefore we think only of ourselves. The result of this self-centeredness is that we become increasingly numbed by the bombardment of images and, in a variation on the "if a tree falls in the woods" query, we can no longer imagine our premediated lives. Media imagery has given us an omniscient perspective—we can be on the grassy knoll, by the Twin Towers, on the beach as the tsunami hits—while never having to incur the horrors of being there. "Mediation" inevitably closes us off to the unmediated world, home of those victims of the tsunami whose lives are hideously hard and where no media put them front and center. This provocative, extreme and compelling work is a must-read for philosophers of every stripe. (Mar. 2)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
De Zengotita's style is both reflective and sardonic as he delves into the ways the media has shaped our individual reactions to modern culture and events. Influenced by the media-inspired "culture of performance," we now live our lives as if we are performers practicing method acting, he maintains. We go through the motions of expected reactions to everything from the 9/11 terrorist attacks to Princess Diana's death to documentaries of the Kennedy assassination and the civil rights movement. The Internet, satellite television, and a host of technological products and services now give us the impression of participating in current and historical events to such an extent that we can barely distinguish the varying levels of what de Zengotita categorizes as ranging from the real-real to the unreal-real. Analyzing car commercials, cell-phone usage, the social art of teenagers, and other aspects of modern culture, with keen detail and wit, de Zengotita offers an amazing look at how media affects our culture, our choices, and our responses to our media-filtered lives. Completely absorbing, amusing and insightful. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"One of the best books I've ever read about the media." (Brian Lehrer, host of On the Media, National Public Radio )

"Reading Thomas de Zengotita's Mediated is like spending time with a wild, wired friend-the kind who keeps you up late and lures you outside of your comfort zone with a speed rap full of brilliant notions." (O magazine )

"A fine roar of a lecture about how the American mind is shaped by (too much) media...." (Washington Post )

"Deceptively colloquial, intellectually dense...This provocative, extreme and compelling work is a must-read for philosophers of every stripe." (Publishers Weekly )

Customer Reviews

New Breed of Narcissist5
In Mediated (at one time titled The Flattered Self), Zengotita shows how a media-saturated culture has created a new breed of narcissists-namely you and me. We are, Zengotita argues, so self-absorbed, so obsessed with our own flattery, so hell-bent on the creation of our own perverse sense of celebrity that we have lost the true measure of greatness. For example, he argues that we can no longer aspire to great heroism because truly heroic figures are no longer relevant in our media world. Heroism, which requires devotion, sacrifice, imagination, and mythos, has been replaced with counterfeit celebrity that makes "heroism" appealing only when it's a consumer product. Literalism, self-aggrandizement, being pandered to by an onslaught of advertisers in every media form, and the resulting delusion that we are always the center of the universe makes us into pseudo celebrities so that we have no room in our consciousness for the real heroes of the world. He makes a great case for the fact that we have become, thanks to the media, more like full-time actors than real humans. All of us, he says, have learned from television "method acting," so that a media person could stick a microphone in front of any Average Joe and that Average Joe would be able to give a polished interview. We're all competing to be the star in a world of wannabe celebrities.

He does a good job of showing how television gives us a God's-eye view of everything so that we have a delusion of omniscience and this false power fuels our delusions of grandeur. Additionally, this God's-eye view spoils us so that we can't live in stillness and see life in the here and now but only media's cheap, hyped representations of life.

This unhealthy quest for god-hood, he shows, has taken shape in the popularity of Reality TV shows, which feed our sense of entitlement, self-pity, and our narcissistic wish to be recognized over others.

By showing how our inability to embrace true heroes connects to our obsession with making ourselves into pseudo heroes, Zengotita has found an original, sometimes funny, and always profound way to make us look at the way the media is shaping our psyches and our souls.

Delightful and Devastating 5
In recent years, Tom de Zengotita has emerged has one of the most ambitious of the Harper's Magazine essayists. Fans of those essays won't be disappointed here. Mediated combines the themes of his Harper's work into a seamless whole. The result is an engaging, funny, and deeply serious meditation on the role of mediation in our frantic postmodern lives.

De Zengotita is an anthropologist by training, but a cultural critic/philosopher by trade-and a damn good one who covers his ground with authority. As a teacher at the Dalton School, he enjoys deep exposure to the trends of teenagers, and as a professor at NYU's Graduate School of Arts & Science, he has his finger on the more absurd developments in the highbrow stuff, too. Both modes of being are beautifully fused in this book, enabling him to tackle his subject from both directions.

The gist of his argument is this: The ultimate (and often intentionally secret) goal of modernity is to get God out of the equation so man can finally become the author of his own being. The terror of arbitrariness-the accident of your race and gender-and the universal pain of anonymity, are cured, superficially, by the freedom to make choices. Mediation steps in to give you "options"-to give you the freedom to choose this or that and pave the way to selfhood. Everything, including the ground and the sky, can be thought of, presented, packaged, and (sometimes) sold in ways that are flattering to You and only You. Forget heroes and idols. You are the center of it all. And celebrities? They need You to buy into their brand, too.

(Two examples Me-centeredness I've noticed since reading the book: The "Welcome- Your Name Here" bit on the opening page of this very site, and Citibank's ATMs way of addressing you like an old friend: "Hold on, I'm working on it" as if a computer that can't speak can somehow have a casual, friendly tone.)

In Mediated, you'll learn why storms now have names. You'll learn why people describe 9/11 as a "surreal" event. You'll learn why George Bush assumes the postures of Texas manliness. You'll learn why it has become normal to implant fish genes in strawberries. And, of course, you'll learn why we feel compelled to put words in "quotes."

All of this is placed in its historical context without being dry and academic. In the same, casual tone, de Zengotita explains the philosophical underpinnings of the Simpsons and Harry Potter, and how Nietzsche, Descartes, and Locke, relate to the prospect of human cloning. In the process, we learn what we have gained from mediation and what we have lost. And we've gained and lost a lot.

The book is deeply funny, and delivered with a modesty rare in such lofty pursuits. A must read for anyone who wants to talk with depth and seriousness about the cultural issues that define our era.


not the usual junk4
Tired of your newsweekly's glitzy "media" column? Or establishment outlets like CNN Reliable Sources? This book is some non-corporate, free thinking... substance! (at last) Written from a genuinely philosophical bent, informed by history and the social sciences, this is not the kind of analysis you find in the MSM.
But the beauty part is it's all that AND a breeze to read. And covers not just the usual political-media topics, but how media pervades how we live our lives in all the day-to-day banality.
So, great beach reading AND you'll impress your summer dinner guests afterwards with your insights from this book...