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Thomas de Zengotita. Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in It. New York: Bloomsbury 2005. ix+219 pp. $22.95 (cloth), ISBN 9781582343570.
Zengotita invites companionate reading. His book, at first hearing, joins conversations in media criticism held by the likes of Marshall McLuhan and Daniel Boorstin, extended by Neil Postman and Todd Gitlin, and now proliferating in media criticism studies ranging from critical theory to rhetorical criticism and even to religiously informed analysis. In contrast with that more standard list, here are the literary comrades I propose. The first is Nicholas Abercrombie and Brian Longhurst's Audiences, a sociological inquiry into the role of performance in a culture whose experience of the media is bewilderingly diffuse. The second is Richard Russo's novel Straight Man about a middle-aged English department chair exploring the moral possibilities in the play of ironic personae. He is always saying things like, "I'm not a religious man, but I can play that role." Zengotita's hybrid book triangulates between sociology and fiction, assuming the critical insights of the one, speaking in the voice of the other. Mediated's befriending of academic media criticism with creative nonfiction is an engrossing effort to think aloud in public.
Zengotita is less concerned about the mass media than he is about mediation, a condition that gels the public and the private into an amorphous, affable, decidedly narcissistic shape. The Blob, as he calls it, sounds like contemporary life as depicted by Abercrombie and Longhurst: so pervaded by screens and speakers as to challenge distinctions between the solipsistic and the civic, between self and the other. Because we are comfortably unsure, in any given circumstance, whether we are performers or spectators, we make self-formation our chief end - a pursuit which, as Zengotita is always pointing out, sustains and is sustained by mediation. To get at this condition, he works his way through familiar experiences, defamiliarizing as he goes, disclosing the performative aspects of childrearing, marriage, workplace life, and our experience of nature. Mediation, he says again and again, is about finding a comfy seat for the self at the center of all things.
This hermeneutic of mediation makes for some fun upsets of academic tropes. It is a scholarly commonplace, for instance, that...