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

De Zengotita, Thomas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1582343578 ISBN 13: 9781582343570

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2005

Synopsis

A provocative, eye-opening look at the way media shapes every aspect of our lives.

Just when you thought 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 distant lands, from high school cliques to marital therapy, from hip-hop nation to climbing Mt. Everest, from blogs to reality TV to the Weather Channel, Mediated takes us on a tour of every department of our media-saturated society. And at every turn we see ourselves as we are, immersed in options, surrounded by representations, driven to unprecedented levels of self-consciousness-and obliged by these circumstances to transform our very lives into performances.

Sophisticated, satirical, sometimes searing, ultimately forgiving, Mediated tackles everything we take for granted and reintroduces us to it all as if for the first time. You'll laugh, you'll squirm, you'll agree, you'll object-but you'll find more Aha! moments packed into fewer pages than you've ever come across before.

About this title

About the Author:

Thomas de Zengotita is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine and the Nation, and holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University. He teaches at the Dalton School and at the Draper Graduate Program at NYU.

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)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1582343578
• ISBN 13: 9781582343570
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208