You remember where you were on 9/11, right? Most likely you weren't physically there in downtown Manhattan, but you remember all the details vividly—who you watched the news coverage with, trying to call a friend who worked in the financial district, the fear and horror you felt, the azure blue of the sky. If asked, you could tell a whole story about how you experienced the events of that morning. Perhaps at the time you were even conscious of taking mental notes as to how you might frame the story for a future telling.

In Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in It Thomas De Zengotita, a professor at NYU and a contributing editor at Harper's, argues that since World War II, a profound shift has occurred in the way we encounter reality. In Mediated, Zengotita writes that members of the Greatest Generation did not have the same stories as you or I might have of 9/11 because those who weren't at Pearl Harbor, for instance, didn't feel inclined to talk about an event they didn't experience. They felt it didn't happen to them, whereas all of us, felt that 9/11 happened to us, even though we weren't there. Zengotita describes this as a result of the "Me-World" of postmodernism, in which we are constantly flattered by "the Blob," the edgeless, all-consuming, all-encompassing prism of media representations, into the belief that we are the center of every story.

Mediation, as Zengotita describes it, is the postmodern condition—more media than ever before, more self-reflexivity than ever before, but mostly more choices. Endless choices about everything, from your cereal to your identity: Should you eat Rice Krispies or Capt. Crunch? Should you don your Guatemalan peasant skirt or your Nehru jacket? (But here's the paradox: Whatever identity you choose, the demand is to be yourself.) What has been created, according to Zengotita, is a world of surfaces where we perform our existences like method actors, hyper self-conscious of our acting, mediated by a world designed to flatter us.

I spoke to De Zengotita from his home in Brooklyn in mid-July.
—BKM

Brian K. Mahoney: Let's start with your concept of the flattering media, a recurring theme in Mediated. You write that we are surrounded by messages that are specifically tailored to address us, to make us feel, individually, as if we are the center of the universe. How does the media flatter us?

Thomas De Zengotita: We're all familiar with all the obvious ways: advertising, for example, flatters you, and that has to do with content and that's all very real and operative. But the thing I think I've noticed in this book that other media scholars people haven't noticed is that media by their nature, going way back through history—pictures, anything—address us. They pay attention to us. They're a little frame and they solicit us. I think we have a hardwired, mammalian response to attention, like a little puppy squirming if you address it. I think that's an aspect of the flattery of representation that's been missed because it's so fundamental and so pervasive. We live like fish in the water; we don't notice it.

As modern times got launched, and media started to multiply, and people's access to various forms of media increased, we get more and more flattered. So I'm really arguing that one, obviously not the sole, but one of the causal factors in the development of modern individualism is the media addressing you constantly and making you aware of yourself. That's what the adjective mediated means. You become reflexive, aware of yourself increasingly, the more you get solicited and addressed by media. And the more different kinds of media they are, and the more fabulously and incessantly they address you, the more flattered you get, and the more self-conscious, the more reflexive. The more you feel like the center of the universe because you are, in effect, in the center of a virtual universe around you that's addressing you as if you were a judge of history, a lord of nature.

BKM: With the era of media saturation that we're now in, is one form of media more flattering than another? Like for instance, a billboard advertising lingerie versus a CNN broadcast?

TDZ: Yeah, sure. And this gets into the question of content somewhat, but also a form of how it comes at you. Let's take the most kind of neutrally flattering but very broadly flattering kind of thing, like that would just be a street sign. Then some kind of media that's up there like, my favorite example at the moment are the iPod ads on bus stops, the ones that show the profiles of these people dancing with the iPod. The profiles are all very different but readily identifiable, sort of postmodern types, and those I think, in addition to the name iPod, which in effect means what I call in the book "Me-World," to stand for the virtual environments that people are in now.

The iPod in effect offers you a product which gives you a more or less permanent soundtrack to your life. And you, as this performative/mediated individual, are living at the center of that life, and now you've got a soundtrack, and that's what iPod is. And the diversity of profiles, outlines, and things like that, specifically address a whole variety of people. So that's a lot more flattering than a street sign because it reaches out directly to you in the name iPod and in whatever the profile is that you identify with.

BKM: How has this intensification of flattery changed the way in which we interact with the media?

TDZ: If you look at a newsreel or TV interview with a man in the street or an ordinary businessman, let's say in the late 40s or early 50s, appearing on television because he's been swept up in some historical event and he's being interviewed, you'll notice an awkwardness. He kind of leans into the mike and he doesn't quite know how far and he looks kind of mystified and his eyes dart around. He doesn't know how to act; he can't quite trust whether his voice is going to reach anybody. There's a real awkwardness to the way an ordinary person addressed a microphone or a camera in the 50's.

Today, if you look at your average man-in-the-street interview, there's been a great traffic tie-up because of a storm, and they rush out and interview people in their trucks and on the streets, ordinary people today are as smooth and cool as the most practiced celebrity when they confront a camera or a microphone. They look in the eyes of the interviewer, and they look directly at the camera, they speak not too loud, not too soft, very colloquially, they laugh, they make spontaneous jokes, they're completely comfortable. And why? Because they're taking pictures of themselves all the time!

BKM: This readiness in people in the mediated society to perform for the camera connects with your idea that we are now all method actors. How have we become so self-reflexive? Is it that the flattery in the media has created this method acting in us?

TDZ: Like all of these processes, it's a combination of many, many things, but it's no accident that method acting as an approach to theater arose during the same years that the media began to rapidly expand. And naturalism, the idea of being real on the screen, or being real on the stage, grabbed hold of people who actually are actors, at the same period in our cultural history as people began to become aware of themselves through the prism of psychoanalysis, specifically, and therapies and self-help programs in general. Those two things happened at the same time, and again, it's no accident that at the same time the whole tradition of formality in the middle class began to come apart. When I was growing up, when we went on an airplane in the 50s, we'd get dressed up. There was a formality to public life that sort of corresponded to the old kinds of formalities that we had in acting. So a kind of naturalism arose in the culture in the same time that the mediated environment began to make people psychologically aware of themselves and sociologically aware of the roles and the institutions that they lived in and with to an unprecedented degree, and of course I'm talking about the 60s more than anything else.

So when mediation really took hold, people became method actors just to the degree that they became so aware of the sociology and psychology of their place in life and their relationships, that they had to live their lives through a filter of self consciousness that all of those media brought to bear on them, and to that degree they became both the performers of their lives and the livers of their lives. That's why it's nice to have a soundtrack for your movie.

And pop performers have taken the place of heroes, because pop performers, rather than challenging you to do gigantic sacrificial deeds, pop performers essentially discover you; discover who you are. When you are swept away by a Dylan song it's because you're recognizing yourself. He's putting it to words. You're being uplifted in a kind of self discovery and you say, "Oh yes, this is how I feel, oh yes, this is what I think, oh yes, this is who I am." And so performers become heroes just to the degree that the flattered, mediated self takes center stage, and a performer who's discovering you in a song is also teaching you to be a performer in your life.

There's a whole sequence in the book about teenage life and how you create and construct your identities as a kid, and to some degree, of course, adolescents will always have to do that. But today and, starting with my generation through today, the degree to which adolescents have to decide who they are and construct an adult, all the way from exactly how you're going to stand and sit, how you're going to register disdain, or what's the cool way to say hello, or do you want to be a goth or not, or are you going to be a jock or not. All of the myriad ways in which adolescents have to go about constructing themselves, all are functions, again, of the environment of mediated options around them—you can choose a version of yourself. Or most likely, what actually happens for most people is you cut and paste. You browse through all these environments and images in an ongoing way through your whole life. You improvise and—I'm using that word as an actor—you improvise your identity and it changes a lot.

BKM: This abundance of choices that we enjoy in all aspects of our lives brings us to another idea in your book—that the opposite of the real is no longer the phony or the contrived but optionality, this very abundance of choices. What do you mean by that?

TDZ: Think of a Shakespeare play. The classic opposition is: There's real and authentic over here, and then there's artificial and contrived and phony over there. And every once in a while you get a romantic, bohemian hippie moment in the culture: Everyone wants to go back to nature and be real, whether it's Rousseau or the diggers in California in the 60s; that's always been the dynamic of that. But my argument in the book is that the exaggerational levels of mediation got to the point where there's so few things or places or moments in your life now that aren't mediated, that the axis of opposition between real and unreal shifted from real versus phony or artificial to real versus optional. And that's best illustrated in a quick way by the colloquial expression—"the reality is x."

And what they mean by that now is, this is something that isn't an option. This is something that has to be dealt with. I think the most dramatic way to bring home the idea that it's real versus optional now is to use the example of wilderness experiences, direct encounters with nature. That was the classic way in which you used to leave the phony artificial world of society and go back to what was real and authentic. You did a Thoreau and you lived at Walden. I mean, that's been the way in which you encountered the real authentic world before.

I make an argument in the book, in the chapter on nature, that people have become so mediated, so intensely self conscious, so much method actors, that even if you're a person who loves nature, goes to it for refreshment and nourishment and to escape society on a regular basis, takes month long trek vacations in the wilderness of Alaska, whatever it might be, you've become such an intensely mediated person that even if you're out there in the completely untouched wilderness, in an environment that's completely uncontrived, nothing has been done to it, except of course it's a park and you chose to go there on vacation. That alone, the framing of the experience that's imposed on it by you, by your mediated sense of yourself and what all this means to you and why you've chosen to do this, that's enough, that alone is enough to turn the natural setting that you're actually really in into an icon of itself, so that even when you're there in the untouched wilderness there's a certain way in which the wilderness represents itself as well as being itself for you. Why? Ultimately because your experience of it is optional.

BKM: So we can no longer go to nature as nature and seek authenticity?

TDZ: We can go and seek it, and you can find a mediated version of it. I'm not going to pretend that if you spend a month in the wilderness you're going to have a lot of authentic experiences, but they will be—I don't want to use the word tainted—they will be framed. They will be framed as experiences. Put it this way: When you're out there having all these experiences, you will be thinking—if you're not taking pictures of them—you will be thinking about how you're going to tell the stories you're going to tell about it when you get home. And there will be a little performative narrative framework through which you experience your encounter with nature.

BKM: In your book you give an example of a somewhat unmediated moment: A car breaks down out in Saskatchewan, and you don't have e-mail, you don't have a cell phone, and you're stuck just there. And this links up with our idea of how to break out of mediation through accident and necessity. Can you speak to that?

TDZ: The thing about the little accident as opposed to the trek in Alaska is that you didn't choose it. And that's incredibly important to show the difference between a real encounter, an encounter with something real or a real moment, and a mediated moment, so even though this is just a little accident on a country road somewhere, the fact that you didn't choose to be there, that the car just [a splatting noise]. And there you are, and it's just a random place, and there's no benches, and there's no paths, and there's no campsite, and there's no Plexiglas lecterns telling you what things are about, and there's no little carved little things on the trees to tell you the trails, and all of that. It's just a little asphalt, some crumbling stuff, a broken down fence, a few bugs, random sounds. Nothing there is for you and you didn't go there for this. You just accidentally happened to be there, and that changes the quality of the experience that you have during that two or three hours that you're just sitting around with no media to insulate yourself with. That changes the quality of that experience and it kind of reminds you of what it would be like to live a completely unmediated life where accident and necessity press in on you constantly and your options are very limited. You have very few choices about what you might want to do during those few hours, and that gives you a feeling of a kind of an authentic encounter with the real, and it also, by the way, will give you a very strong sense of just how tiny you are and insignificant in the universe. In other words, you will be deflattered radically for those couple hours.

BKM: In your book you mention some of the positives in the mediated society, such as what you call the Justin's Helmet principle. Can you explain this?

TDZ: If you look at books about the media right now, they'll pretty well divide up into mostly left-wing kind of neo-Marxist Thomas Franks attacks on the way in which corporate media and political parties and forces in the country use media to distract and deceive people, and to co-opt cool, and to make rebellion into a commodity. So that's one group. And the other group is mostly people who hype the media: no limits, we can do this, you can do that, you can do—how wonderful it all is, and so on. My own view is that there's a lot of truth to everything that both of those parties have to say. I certainly agree that corporations use media to make people buy stupid things and distract them from more important things, and that politicians use media to tell people lies and misinform them and misrepresent the world. All that's true. And it's also true that media provided all these wonderful tools and amazing capacities and allowed people to have choices and flexibilities, yadda yadda yadda. So that's true too.

If you look at this from the point of view of an individual leading an individual life, having these options is more a good thing than a bad thing, although in almost every case there's a kind of diminishment of authenticity, a kind of ethical or aesthetic diminishment of your existence at the same time. Justin's Helmet refers to one of those huge bulbous bike helmets that those little four-year-old kids wear wherever they go—the whole idea of surrounding your kid with $700 strollers and knee pads and building a bubble around your kid's life. And obviously today as a responsible parent, you wouldn't let your kid run around without being protected in various ways. You just wouldn't do it.

BKM: But you argue in your book that there's an aesthetic wrongness with the culture of Justin's Helmet.

TDZ: Well, all you've got to do is look at the bike helmet. I mean, it looks ridiculous. It looks like he's the hemophiliac heir to the throne of the Hapsburgs. All you've got to do is work in a school, I mean an upscale private school or suburban high school. The degree to which the expectations of parents and educational institutions about kids now is that they should never, certainly never, suffer physical harm of any kind. Nothing. All the things we took for granted 50 years ago: no corporal punishment, no bullying, no fighting, no teasing, no hurting feelings. They've got professional counselors in fourth grade, teaching kids how to mediate conflicts between themselves. Obviously, adults always regulated kids' behaviors, but when I was growing up no teacher ever leaned over to me and said, "Tommy, how are you feeling about this? I think you're angry at so-and-so." Ever. That was all off limits. Adults just told you how to behave. But now so this bulbous bike helmet stands for a whole apparatus of insulation—all this is mediated. You say to a little kid, "How are you feeling?" You're turning that kid into a performer. The kid's going—I mean in the long run the kid's going—"Well, how am I feeling?" Or you say, "How do you think you would feel if Sarah said that to you?" and then the little kid—I've watched this, I've been in schools all my life—the little kid looks up and thinks, "Well, how would I feel?" That's a little moment which, by way of the sort of distant cousin of therapy, you're teaching a child to perform their own emotional life. And our schools are saturated with this now.

If you're a neoconservative Republican and you went through the riff I just went through, you'd be talking about how this is so bad, it spoils kids, and so on and so forth. But I just went through this whole thing in a tone that kind of sounded like I was saying it's spoiling and coddling kids, and indeed to some degree it is. But if you ask me is it better to grow up the way my children grew up, in environments like that, or to grow up in environments like where I grew up, where people got beat up regularly. The faculty knew about it—bullies ran the halls, and teachers and administrators did nothing. And we ran around without bike helmets. We broke our arms. We were out all over the neighborhoods, eight-year-old boys—girls too—that was just how it was. You just let kids alone. And if you ask me would I want my kids to grow up the way I grew up or the way they in fact grew up, with all this mediation and insulation and self-consciousness around them, there's no question. I'd choose the bike helmet.

BKM: For those who want to escape from this process of mediation for this idea of accident and necessity, how can somebody seek this out or try and make this happen in their life?

TDZ: I think a lot of people, almost everybody I know, does this in various ways. I'm not sure they think of it as being an effort to escape from mediation, but I think it is. So one of the most obvious things people do—I personally don't do this—is have a little crafty kind of hobby, absorption and kind of simple real implements and tools, not computer tools, but actual wood things in your fingers. People invest themselves in manual crafty sorts of activities because there you've got edge. Every time you make something, you chip a little here and it doesn't quite go, and you have to accommodate. The whole process of dealing with physical things in some kind of a simple way, so you're not too self-conscious about it. As soon as you start to get into "Oh, I'm going to submit it for a prize or a contest or something," then the whole atmosphere changes, which is what happens, say, to kids' sports now. So that's one way. Another way is to just not make plans when you go places, to leave yourself—there's a whole chapter in the book about time, about what's happened to our time under the reign of mediation. And one simple way you can fight back is to make sure that your life has a lot of unstructured time in it, and then you kind of behave according to whims in that time instead of arranging through some sequence of: you just go online, you see this, you have to go here. Instead of doing that, you make sure you go to a lot of places that aren't there to be visited.

BKM: For instance?

TDZ: For instance, instead of going to the section of any city or town which is restored so that it'll have the restored cannery red brick thing full of the little shops and so on, you get on a random bus and you get off at some random place and you spend the afternoon there. You walk around and you sit on a bench somewhere and look at kids playing in some broken down little park. And when you're driving from place x to place y, you just get in your car, and you get off the freeway and you go here and you go there. And you don't go to the quaint little village that looks like downtown Rhinebeck. You don't go there. You go to some place that hasn't been turned into a little mini-themey place yet, although they're hard to find. But most of all you do it by—you just in effect flip a coin when you travel. And you're going to waste a lot of time. I know a lot of people who do what I just said and then I know a lot of people who wouldn't dream of doing that, because you spend an awful lot of time in places where nothing is happening. There's nothing to take a picture of. Go to places where there's nothing to take a picture of and leave your camera at home just in case.