Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in It

Like a modern-day Jonah, Thomas de Zengotita's "Mediated" updates Marshall McLuhan to deliver a new message about "the MEDIA" from the post-modern belly of the whale.

Having just finished reading this book, I am about to do something I have never done with any other - immediately start reading it again. After what is at heart a pessimistic and rather fatalistic vision of our present and future, I feel strangely uplifted and inspired. Maybe, as other reviewers have mentioned, it is the feeling that a crucial truth is being unmasked about the direction man, and the West in particular, is heading. He makes a persuasive case for why people want what they want and why cultural and media organisations respond to us in the way they do. Perhaps it is the rare exhilaration of reading something that feels like agenda-free speech, someone seeking only to find a pattern in it all. Or maybe it is the excitement of receiving an authoritative perspective it is hard to challenge. The writer uses history and philosophy to support highly sensitive powers of observation about the present. He clearly enjoys people's strengths and their foibles but fears for us. He would be the first to admit he is not a god, but it feels very important to listen to what he's saying.

De Zengotita is a brilliant and elegant writer who is able to put clear words to vast and complex problems you've thought about and struggled with, but were unable to ever properly articulate--problems regarding where our relationship to the ever-expanding media might be leading us. Combining erudite philosophical insight, humanistic anthropological concerns, and highly readable language, he takes the hyper-self-conscious world of reality shows and 24 hour news in which we live, and questions the effects it is having on the way we think about ourselves, and the way we see what's around us.  The examples he uses are absorbing, hilarious, and scarily dead on.  This is the kind of book that changes you, and sends you back to the world with new weapons of perception...

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.

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.