Mediated

by Thomas de Zengotita

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.
"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

Genres: Nonfiction, Sociology, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology, Cultural, Anthropology

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Riku Sayuj · Rating 3 out of 5]

Modern Media & "Outrage Porn"

Rather than report on real stories and real issues, the media find it much easier (and more profitable) to find something mildly offensive, broadcast it to a wide audience, generate outrage, and then broadcast that outrage back across the population in a way that outrages yet another part of the population.

This triggers a kind of echo of bullshit pinging back and forth between two imaginary sides, meanwhile distracting everyone from real societal problems.

It’s no wonder we’re more politically polarized than ever before. We have to figure out a way to break this loop... The future stability of our political systems may depend on it.

The writer and media commentator Ryan Holiday refers to this as “Outrage Porn.” It made #10 in The Biggest Problem in the Universe list.

http://thebiggestproblemintheuniverse...

Deservedly.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a frustrating book. It is built around an essay he wrote which I thought was excellent. He should have left it at that. There were many gems in this book, but it was poorly argued, almost incoherent, unfocused, and most importantly--pointless. He states in clear terms that the Christian worldview is nonsense and those that follow it are delusional or victims of habit. He never states why any of it matters. What does it matter how people interact with the world if there is no ultimate purpose to the world or to our existence? Yet he argues as though it does matter. I agree that it matters, but I have good reasons why--he's got nothing but complaints and rants. Read the essay entitled "The Numbing of the American Mind: Culture as Anesthetic and leave it at that. Or if you really want to read the gems, I've got them typed out. But save yourself the time and frustration of reading the book.

[Frank · Rating 4 out of 5]

He's best on the typologies of the real (19-20); from "real real" to "edited real real" to "staged observed real repeated" and beyond.

More valuable points:

"The best way to achieve the insulational state of numbness is to be swamped with routine activities." (186)

Habit "in a mediated adulthood that dims down the horizon of options through immersion in a numbing routine allows many of us to feel relatively real." (189)

Overreach:

"[R]epresentational technologies have colonized our minds. . . . To the extent that our thoughts no longer wander along on their own, stocked only with materials drawn from direct experience, to the extent they follow flows of representations instead--to just that extent we don't think our own thoughts." (196)

Compare Ozick on Helen Keller:

"Her dependence on Annie for the assimilation of her immediate surroundings was nearly total, but through the raised letters of Braille she could be altogether untethered: books coursed through her...."

"[But] the cruellest appraisal of all came, in 1933, from Thomas Cutsforth, a blind psychologist. By this time, Helen was fifty-two, and had published [many] volumes. Cutsforth disparaged everything she had become. The wordless child she once was, he maintained, was closer to reality than what her teacher had made of her through the imposition of “word-mindedness.” He objected to her use of images such as “a mist of green,” “blue pools of dog violets,” “soft clouds tumbling.” All that, he protested, was “implied chicanery” and “a birthright sold for a mess of verbiage.”

"For Cutsforth—and not only for him—she was the victim of language rather than its victorious master. She was no better than a copy; whatever was primary, and thereby genuine, had been stamped out."
***
"[S]he was a warrior in a vaster and more vexing conflict. Do we know only what we see, or do we see what we somehow already know? Are we more than the sum of our senses? Does a picture—whatever strikes the retina—engender thought, or does thought create the picture? Can there be subjectivity without an object to glance off? Theorists have their differing notions, to which the ungraspable organism that is Helen Keller is a retort. She is not an advocate for one side or the other in the ancient debate concerning the nature of the real. She is not a philosophical or neurological or therapeutic topic. She stands for enigma; there lurks in her still the angry child who demanded to be understood yet could not be deciphered. She refutes those who cannot perceive, or do not care to value, what is hidden from sensation: collective memory, heritage, literature."

"Helen Keller’s lot, it turns out, was not unique. “We work in the dark,” Henry James affirmed, on behalf of his own art; and so did she. It was the same dark. She knew her Wordsworth: “Visionary power / Attends the motions of the viewless winds, / Embodied in the mystery of words: / There, darkness makes abode.” She vivified Keats’s phantom theme of negative capability, the poet’s oarless casting about for the hallucinatory shadows of desire. She fought the debunkers who, for the sake of a spurious honesty, would denude her of landscape and return her to the marble cell. She fought the literalists who took imagination for mendacity, who meant to disinherit her, and everyone, of poetry. Her legacy, after all, is an epistemological marker of sorts: proof of the real existence of the mind’s eye."

[Hillary Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an amazing book which has seriously changed the direction of my planning for PhD studies. It is written, as another reviewer keenly observed, in the voice of the best sort of teacher, one who challenges, cajoles, and sometimes infuriates and never ever leaves you feeling quite the same after being in their classroom.

Dr. de Zengotita anticipated the reader's desire for a solution to the dilemma he describes yet none the less, leaves us without one, as impossible to formulate. How are we to address a world is which everything is mediated to such an extant that it's become nearly impossible to find elements of any "real" experience what so ever? And is it even true, that this is the current state of affairs?

This is an ideal book if you like to have your thinking mind truly provoked into examining the layers of representation that comprise ?much of the world around us, in us, of us... Are we approaching a singularity of creativity and originality? And in a world of reflexivity and representation, how are we to move forward in ways which (maybe) have the possibility of steering us from the brink of planetary disaster.

It's a lot for a meditation teacher to ponder. I think I'll be sitting with this one for a while. If you read it too, by all means let me know so we can talk about it together.

[Patrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eye-opening ideas, riveting writing. There were moments when I caught myself hallucinating, picturing myself hanging with Marshall McLuhan and listening to him rant due to excessive use of amphetamines. But in a good way.

[lbh. · Rating 2 out of 5]

the book isn't uninteresting, but also isn't anywhere near exhaustive in its analysis--i think the author'ss arm-chair critiquing what he sees around him, rather than advancing any seriously developed theories. i liked the introduction, though, and his theory of "optionality" defining virtual experience. but not enough to finish the book.

[Yesenia · Rating 5 out of 5]

i LOVED this book. it is not the best analytical, theoretical, critical essay that i have ever read... or maybe it is, in parts. i mean, some aspects are truly, um, great. as in, Marx, Simone de Beauvoir, Mary Harrington, Friedrich Engels, Zygmunt Bauman, Elizabeth Anderson, great. The kind of analyses whose explanatory power is so good that you really LEARN things, you really SEE sense, meaning. And their explanatory capacity is so good that they apply 20 years later even though the point is that changes are so fast and so vast that they induce qualitative transformations. The book holds.

it is also true that there are some chapters, some analyses, that are, i dunno how to phrase it... less good, let's say. and i only say that because as i write this, i feel the judgemental eyes of my friend, you know who you are, who would say, "oh, come on, this guy says nothing new and nothing interesting, he just spouts these concepts like the blob and you're all, oh wow!" and although i want to slap you, friend, for being so damned righteous and generally right about so many things, so picky you are, so exquisitely intellectually up there (and you are, i know this), i also acknowledge that there is something, i don't know, off-putting about the book's style or delivery or something. off-putting for intellectual people, i mean.

and i am both an intellectual person and a normal person. i can do both. and Thomas de Zengotita sort of does both, but, but, but... there's a but, there.

AND YET, aha! no "buts" about my 5 star rating, snobby intellectual friend!!!!!

[Dan Sumption · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was a bit unsure how relevant a book written over 15 years ago would be to today's media landscape. This was written before social media, before the financial crash, before Trump and Johnson, at a time when 9/11 was a fresh memory and George W Bush and Tony Blair were still trying to run things in Iraq. I was surprised though at just how relevant it is - and just how much of those intervening 15+ years the book managed to quite uncannily predict.

The book is not about media per se, or at least not about any particular form of media. Rather it is about the mediation of reality, about having multiple ways of accessing and filtering reality. As de Zengotita says early on in the book "in a mediated world, the opposite of real isn't phony or illusional or fictional—it's optional. Idiomatically, we recognize this when we say, 'The reality is...,' meaning something that has to be dealt with, something that isn't an option. We are most free of mediation, we are most real, when we are at the disposal of accident and necessity." This is really hammered home towards the end of the book when he describes his experiences in New York during and after 9/11.

It's written often in a very individual style, which sometimes flowed beautifully and other times made me wish that he would stop being so damned quirky. But it's one of those books punctuated frequently with "that's so obvious I can't believe I never realised it before" moments. He offers no judgement or solutions, often mentioning what he calls the "Justin's Helmet Principle": when you see children out cycling or skating, wearing big helmets and knee and elbow protection, you may think "that's ridiculous, we never had all of that in my day", but at the same time you're unlikely to send our own kid out unprotected. Likewise with all the ways that media gives you of approaching the world. It may feel wrong, but would you really want to give it up and go back to living in reality, with its single inescapable fixed viewpoint?

[Shan · Rating 1 out of 5]

I picked up this book thinking it would provide a truthful look at how our culture's media obsession is impacting our lives. I knew I was in trouble when in the first chapter I read:

But most people are cool with (having tons of options to exercise at will). At least in the blue states.

At least in the blue states?! Ok, a mild dig at conservatives. I should come to expect this from an author like de Zengotita, whose existence doesn't expand beyond the socialistic walls of academia. Men like him wouldn't survive in the world proper for more than two ticks. I can brush off this erroneous and false notion that red-staters abhor options.

I read on.

I should've stopped when I had the chance. Not two pages later, de Zengotita whips out this pseudo-intellectual babble:

These same people (who believe there is nothing new under the sun) tend to think it's deep to talk about historical pendulums ... they never fail to remind us that there have always been representations of choice ... Beliefs like that are crude denials of the psychological process that actually determine how we function.

In short order, this guy mocks the book of Ecclesiastes and tells me that because I point to established historical cultural patterns that I'm in some form of denial. Say what?

In other words, I don't buy into his theory so therefore I'm the one who is off-base. This fellow obviously uses the same scientific method we see used to prove global warming. Data?! We don't need no stinkin' data!

So no thanks. If I want to be mocked by someone without a clue I'll watch the president speak.

[Jared Colley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simply put (perhaps too simply), this book is about the media and its effects - but it is also about something more fundamental. This book is the most clear expression (or demonstration) of what it means to say we live in "the postmodern era." There has been a lot of books written on what "postmodernism" means, and most of them are lofty academic expositions that speak to only a select few. This book speaks to everyone and says some very thoughtful things about what it means to live in a late-capitalist, media-driven postmodern society. If you're interested in that kind of thing, this is a 5 star account that won't disappoint.

[Aaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent book exploring the cumulative effect that mass media (or perhaps any experience-mediating institution) have had on our experience, especially in the past 400 years. I expected this to be a commentary on institutions of mass media and public opinion, or something along those lines. Instead the book is far more ambitious and does an excellent job of showing how deep the effects of media go into our personal lives.

De Zengotita does an excellent job to keep it interesting (if dense or otherwise hard to digest at times) and to keep it relevant to the overall message, which really comes together at the end. Tough at times, but definitely worth it.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't understand half of what the author was saying. The writing was often pedanic and ostentatious (and very funny at times). Frequently, I didn't know what the examples and anecdotes were supposed to illustrate. Everything de Zengotita says is pure conjecture. But I loved the book anyway. I've read and thought a lot about the media and how it shapes our views of the world and ourselves, so I apprectiate a book that makes the suject new for me, so appreciative that I think I'll reread this one and hopefully come to a better understanding of "the paradoxical conditions of life in a flood of imagery."

[Moein Esmaeeli · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was frustrating!
It had some good ideas but ruined by many unnecessary examples.
The writer had no plan for this book and just wrote anything crossed his mind without an order.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting ideas, but a little dated and fatally undisciplined.

[Zachary · Rating 1 out of 5]

Pro tip: when an author has to tell you half a dozen times in their book that they're not a curmudgeon, that probably means they're a curmudgeon. Honestly, this book was a drag from start to finish. De Zengotita has lots of energy in his writing, but is so full of himself and his "insights" that he can't actually string together anything meaningful. He writes as if other thinking on culture has never existed before his, working with almost no reference material or external sources of any kind and pontificating as if his is the first original perspective to peer through the cracks of modern society. Thank you, sir, for telling us that the family's portrayal in media has changed between Leave it to Beaver and The Simpsons; thank you for gracing us with your belief that women don't actually want to work and all their progress in the workplace has been simply a consequence of capitalism rather than any kind of agency of their own; and so on. One of the strangest elements of the book is the way that De Zengotita constantly signals his virtue by noting the progressive causes that he's worked with and crapping on conservative figureheads while also basically critiquing society for many of its more progressive changes, signaling the same kind of fear and unrealistic nostalgia, I'd argue, that appealed so strongly to Trump's audience just a few years ago (and/or today, honestly). Plus the book is just written with a heavy, heavy reliance on references contemporary with its publication, which means it has a shelf life that doesn't reach far beyond our current time, else all of his referents lose their relevance. All in all this is just a terrible book. Great example of how not to do critical/cultural theory, unless you really want to do that type of work and make absolutely no difference at all.

[Ezzy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Things are different than they used to be! Sometimes it's good and sometimes it's bad! I have no data, just a bunch of "damn kids on my lawn!" type examples, but I'm sure it's changing people! Lots of examples about how things are different! No central thesis, just lots and lots of examples! Or maybe there is a thesis, but I can't explain it, because everything is changing, did you see all my examples!!!
SO MANY EXAMPLES AND NO POINT TO IT. I kept waiting for it to tie together into some unifying theme, but no, it's just another old white guy who wants to waste your time talking about the good old days.

[Amy Wass · Rating 4 out of 5]

There was a great deal of thought provoking material in this book. I found myself evaluating statements overheard in conversations and personal ways of living that further added support to the arguments and observations made by the author. It is sobering to think about how subtle yet how fully integrated media is in shaping current culture and thoughts as well as the generational compounding effects of living in a media saturated culture. Some might not enjoy the author’s snark and wit, but I found it enjoyable.

[Diana · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really didn't like this book i liked some parts but it didn't grab my attention i didn't get it but overall Its a good book for others to read

[Madalyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Content wise, this is one of my favorite books (though the writing style can become tedious at parts).

[Hanna Potter · Rating 1 out of 5]

Just an old guy rambling on about problems in the world, without really stating his opinion on what could rectify the problems he complains about.

[Silla Prown · Rating 1 out of 5]

FINALLY I’M FREE!

[Maggi Andersen · Rating 1 out of 5]

Way too pedantic to be entertaining, the humor gets lost in the intellectualizing of literally everything. Yawn.

[Sally Sugarman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a thought provoking, disturbing and challenging book. The basic thesis of the book is that we live in a world of representation. There are so many ways the world is represented to us. The book starts with an incident when actors in an acting studio are told that president JFK has been shot. They immediately see this as an improvisational cue and respond in a variety of ways that imitate an authentic response. Later they are told that what they were originally told was true. Do we react to situations or do we react as we think people react in such a situation? The author talks about his bicycle helmet thesis. It is a good idea that a child is protected from injury by such a helmet, but how do children learn to protect themselves from injury if the helmet does it for them? The author talks about how there are no more heroes, only celebrities because the celebrities are more authentic than the heroes. They are intentionally performing. We know too much about people who might be heroes. We know that the story of George Washington and the cherry tree is a story. We live in an over-represented world. This book was published in 2005, yet de Zengotita’s discussion of Reagan, Clinton and Bush show the contemporary reader how they were the precursors of a president like Trump. The book raises so many questions and at times the reader wants to dispute with the author. At other times the sheer pleasure of reading the description of being at the Museum of Natural History and hearing Tom Hanks’ narration of the creation of the universe is so delightful that one wants more such examples. The way the weather is changed by weather reports is another such example. How people put themselves into the story as they did with Princess Di’s tributes of flowers and tears is another riveting story. Everything comes to us mediated through our representations on television, film and cell phones. News stories move from the tragedies of starving children to the next unrelated segment. Our experiences seem to be second hand experiences. We live busy lives to keep us from being aware what being alive means. In many ways this is an extended personal essay in which the author deals with a range of issues about what is real and what is a concept of reality given to us through all the various media. How is our relationship to the natural world changed by those weather reports?

[Joseph Argueta · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a good book, it entertained me but there was times where i got confused and had to reread things. Its frustrating because there is too many examples. overall it was an alright book.

[Josiah DeGraaf · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is kind of like listening to your brilliant but slightly-eccentric uncle discuss the state of the world and the present-culture. The book jumps from one topic to another rather rapidly, doesn't exactly deal with its topics in a systematic fashion, and makes logical leaps that are a bit questionable at times, but makes a lot of really thought-provoking points about the way that digital media has shaped today's society. The best section was definitely his section on this culture's form of hero-worship and how the quest for authenticity has ended up destroying all the traditional heroes of society. He also made some rather interesting points about the importance of authenticity in politics, which seemed particularly relevant given the results of the 2016 election.

Overall, this was a good book exploring the effects of digital media on the modern world with a unique writing style. I'm not completely convinced that digital media is to blame for everything he discusses here (some problems just seem to stem from human nature), but this book leaves you with a lot to chew on.

Rating: 4.5 Stars (Excellent).

[Kathleen (itpdx) · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this book because I heard this interview of Adrian Grenier http://www.npr.org/templates/story/st... about his documentary, Teenage Paparazzo, about a 13 year-old paparazzo taking pictures of him (Grenier). Grenier refers to this book and says that it shaped his views on media. I thought the book might explain why people want to know everything about celebrities. De Zengotita doesn't explain why people want to know but does explain why they feel entitled to the information--basically, he contends that modern media has left us very self-centered--that it is all about us.

The book includes some interesting and, even, humorous observations of "us". (I think he is talking mostly about "the west"). But the book rambles and isn't very clear or logical (beware non-fiction books that have no index). And his last chapter on terror is almost contradictory to everything that comes before and I think that is mainly him trying to justify his feeling that he experiences a real world because he was in NYC on 9-11.

[Maryrobin G · Rating 3 out of 5]

My husband actually read this book and has read portions aloud to me. I am very impressed by the ideas and am anxious to read it, though I must be in the non-fiction agenda mood, as opposed to the current poetic mood I am in. Basically, we are told how to think by media. Aron and I got rid of our tv in the garage after this (it's totally gone now). And I stopped buying magazines. I still read the newspaper and am on the internet though, it does feel a bit easier to control there. Anyway, great ideas on why you might have more stuff than you need, believe yourself to not be the way you "should", or why you might eat out instead of eating in. It is also why we don't bring our video camera out much any more or snap up photos at every juncture. A good treatise on why peope who watch (through a lens or tv/movies/ipod casts) are actually not living. Look it up. Big brother is here.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even though author chose to write in a style that sounds something like Tommy Chong's character in That 70's Show, he makes a lot of really interesting and well thought out points. It was especially interesting to see how the author's own understanding of this complex aspect of our lives unfolded through his years of study of real people and philosophy. I would recommend this book to anyone, but especially to parents as it basically puts to rest the question of how involved in media kids should be. The answer being that our whole society is now mediated, so it's a much better strategy to learn how to live in this world than to try to hide from it. Because the very core of our thinking is infiltrated by the reflective nature of media there is no way to untangle ourselves, but we can be aware of the flattery and work with it rather than be controlled by it.

[Ben · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this book for my thesis and I was not thoroughly impressed with it (that was almost 6 years ago, so my memory of the work is a bit fuzzy), but it was a worthwhile read about the over-saturation of media messages in our culture, like a blob (that was a metaphor used by de Zengotita) that can, potentially, permeate all empty spaces and consume all things in its path, shaping the world we live in for better or worse. The messages, likewise, can simply be ignored or dealt with. It is helpful, of course, to be able to critically analyze those messages, but the author does not really provide specific insights on how to do so. The book draws in some ways on the work of McLuhan, but the work of McLuhan and others, like Stuart Hall, on mediation is, in my view, far superior.

[Kailin · Rating 4 out of 5]

While it's just a lot of pontificating how how culture is changing as modes of representation change, De Zengotita does it better than anyone else. He manages to put out pretty complicated, critical-theory-related thoughts while sounding brilliantly casual. Sometimes it's annoying but most of the time it works. This book is mostly a collaboration of Harper's articles, with the gaps filled in - so sometimes you feel like he's trying to provide transitions he's not comfortable with. While all the things he talks about are connected, I felt like he was using poetic license acting like they could be explained by some unifying theory.