"Me" culture

We are what we buy at the mall, see at the multiplex, and hear on our iPods. And that's a good thing. Author Thomas De Zengotita discusses our new "Mediated" life.

By James Westcott

Mar 4, 2005 | Let's say you like cats. When you visit a friend's house and he happens to have a cat, you make a big deal about stroking it, picking it up, talking to it. And you do the same thing with every cat you encounter. It demonstrates to the people around you that you're a sensitive, sympathetic, tactile person. All these things are true of you, including your innate adoration of cats. But that doesn't mean to say you haven't cultivated your cat-fancying into a self-conscious, gushing performance that somehow represents you. This doesn't make you a phony; it makes you something else: mediated.

This example of naturalized performance -- and the appropriated friendly prose style, forgiving and scathing in equal measure -- is Thomas De Zengotita's, and it's one of many painfully familiar and riotously entertaining tidbits in his new book, "Mediated: The Hidden Effects of Media on People, Places, and Things." De Zengotita, who teaches philosophy and anthropology at New York University, has mined 30 years of private study and writings to form a theory -- a phenomenology, actually -- of human behavior in a postmodern world overflowing with exhaustingly flattering media representations and endless choices about what kind of person you want to be, but also with the strange demand, always, to be yourself. The result, De Zengotita says, is that we are all mediated, all "method actors" -- again, not phonies, but experts at expressing our authenticity in a performative way.

Mediation -- all those fuzzy, comforting options and representations that stand between us and the real -- is a massive, necessarily messy theory that encompasses more than naturalized performances. It means that everything in our culture is for you and everything is about you.

So politics becomes personalized. The effects of this range from an obsession with Bill Clinton's penis to nurturing and defending one's position on, say, the Iraq war so carefully that one's stance starts to matter more than the war itself (this last is my own example, something the book provokes by the dozen).

And in the "Cult of the Child" chapter, De Zengotita describes how mediation makes education about nothing so much as the exaltation of children's feelings and the sanctity of their opinions: molly-coddled, "padded" kids are asked by teachers and fretful parents to develop a "MeWorld" through assignments about their pets, family, ethnicity, favorite things, dreams and fantasies. The MyTwin dolls available at certain malls -- customized to look just like your child -- offer a neat example of how kids are mediated into seeing the world primarily as a reflection of themselves.

Mediation finds its perfect ally and facilitator in the "Mall World" of hyper-consumerism, where every product and lifestyle choice reflects and creates the kind of person we want to be. And thanks to the global reaches of Wal-Mart, Ikea and the like, our "Mall World" in the West is spreading to the rest of the world.

Still, De Zengotita feels that mediation is "mostly a good thing." Salon met with him at NYU to discuss this and why we should be patient about finding a solution (if, indeed, it's really a problem that needs to be solved at all), even though what often gets lost with mediation's desperate focus on the real is the real itself.

You say in the book that you've never found an adequate definition of postmodernism. Is it the same way with mediation? The two seem to have a lot in common.

I think mediation is the essence of the postmodern condition. The book is about what kind of person exists in a world of representations that constantly make them more and more self-conscious, forcing them to be aware of themselves in relation to a field of options. This kind of reflexivity is a perpetual haunting. You can't get out of it.

How is your book different from others about media saturation?

The core original thought in the book is this idea of representations being inherently flattering. Everyone knows that ads seek to flatter you, but as far as I know, no one has noted the significance of just being addressed, period. I mean this in the sense that an evolutionary psychologist might think of it: You're wired to respond when someone addresses you. Someone says hello, makes a token gesture, acknowledges your existence, and you respond. In this mediated environment, you're incessantly addressed in flattering ways just by virtue of the fact that you are surrounded by these representations. But it's in the nature of flattery to fail to satisfy you.

That's where the motivation for what I call the virtual revolution comes from. As the technology became available, and even before, a class of spectators began to claim the status of celebrity. They felt entitled to it because they've been flattered so much. I think this idea is synthetic: It pulls together phenomena all the way from the popularity of memoirs and autobiographies of ordinary people, from reality TV to blogs, to taking pictures of your life on your cellphone. On and on.

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