"Me" culture

Haven't people always been concerned with representing themselves?

Sure. Ever since the invention of print, I think there has been this incredible half-conscious flattery that goes out to every person who is at the center of this world of addresses. So many things I'm writing about now are no different than they ever were, except there's so much more of it. But the difference is important: It's like the difference between a breeze and a hurricane. As we get to the hurricane end of the mediation spectrum, we find unprecedented levels of reflexivity and self-consciousness. People have always played social roles and had some kind of image of themselves, of course, and the media have always catered to that in one way or another. But nowadays people are aware of all this. Media creators, in turn, know that people are aware of all this and address them accordingly.

You yoke so many things together in the book to describe mediation, from behavior to speech patterns to politics to nature. All of these things are inflected -- or tainted -- with this vague sense of unreality. Everything seems to be a symptom of mediation. Were you afraid of being called a grouch?

Oh yes. And I didn't want to be a grouch. I had to watch for that. I think I used the expression in the book a few times, the "curmudgeon factor." But there was an enormous change from when I first had these ideas, before I got the flattery idea down, when it was just media I was writing about. I wanted it to be all bad, I wanted to attack simulacra, I wanted it all to be the fault of capitalism, and I wanted there to be a way out -- even though I didn't know what it was. Blanket condemnation seemed fine.

But the more I got into the details of people's lives under the regime of mediation, the more good I saw coming from it. I developed the "Justin's-helmet principle." That's what I call judgments of mediated options where you say "OK, this puts me off aesthetically, but..." I see these kids in certain neighborhoods, all padded up in their padded playgrounds -- and it looks so precious, almost ridiculous, compared to the way things were in my childhood when no one had ever heard of a bike helmet. If I just stopped there, I would be a grouch. But the truth is, if I had a young child today, she would be padded to the nines. And that's the way it goes across the field of options the media present to us. It's easy to make fun of those talk shows -- the ones where regular folks bare their souls to Dr. Phil. But Dr. Phil and the whole therapy culture has helped millions, I'm sure of it.

What else changed in your thinking?

I talk a lot in the book about how schools today reinforce a sense of centrality in mediated kids, often using yet more mediation to do it. And I make fun of that and other things too: excesses of identity politics, self-esteem programs, relativism and so on. If I stopped there I'd be a grouch. But I also realize that gay rights, minority rights, the whole idea of being free to be who you are, to have you own identity, the expectation in school that we won't hurt people, won't be cruel to people, alternative lifestyles -- certain aspects of mediated educational settings are easy to mock, but it's undeniably mostly a good thing. So, in the end, I realized that a lot, not all, but a lot of the effects of mediation, even though they grind away at reality and lead to some terrible losses -- of nature, for example -- are mostly a good thing.

You seem to like creating, or identifying, brick walls like this in the book -- things that stop us in our well-worn intellectual tracks and stop us from making the normal comfort-blanket condemnations.

Absolutely. Here's the main one: It would be very interesting to find out what would happen to what remains of the left if their attacks on global corporate culture and Disneyfication could be separated from their concern for the misery of the millions of people who are exploited by or left out of globalization. What if you said: "OK, suppose you could ameliorate the living conditions of those people who are starving, dying, horribly, by the millions, and the price of that would be a global mall. Everyone would become mediated. Everyone would be politically correct. There'd be foolish tourists everywhere. There'd be no nature left. Everything would be an attraction site. The whole world would be Disneyfied. But there'd be no starvation." What would you choose? I don't think you'd have a choice. I think it's a giant case of the Justin's-helmet principle.

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