Mediated: How the Media Shape Your World
by Thomas Zengotita
Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, London and New York, 2005

We lead mediated lives, says writer Thomas Zengotita in his new book, and it is mostly a good thing. Zengotita is a seductive writer who knows you know you are being seduced. We laugh with him as he admits his fallen state, and encourages us to admit our own. We do and it feels good: “Que sera sera”.

What does it mean to lead a mediated life? It is to admit, as The Barenaked Ladies sing, “It’s all been done before.” Nothing we do is original. In fact, we are immersed in images, real and fictive, to the extent that even when we are feeling most real about our lives, even in moments of pure elation or grief, we can nearly always recall how it was just like that time on that episode on TV.

How depressing can that be? Not at all, says Zengotita. The richness is in “getting it”. Getting the references, being in the know. And whether we know it or not, the cultural ether – the Blob, Zengotita calls it (get it?) – mingles in our minds to the degree that we know that our lives are at once real and performances.

But Zengotita is no relativist charlatan. He is in many ways a moralist; he reveals this side of himself most in his least successful chapter – the last, where he attempts to struggle with the concept of the original through Nietzsche. He ceases to play and becomes earnest in his attempt to save the authentic. But perhaps he is just being ironic.

But ironic distance, even if it is the modus operandi of modern life, is not what Zengotita is about. Whether he is considering childhood and parenting, or adolescence, or the fate of nature, his playful approach discards irony. Even as his beautiful sentences set us up for his next zinger – playing us, as it were – he is able to capture truths about modern life that are invigorating.

An example: in Chapter Five –  Busy, Busy –  he is able to explain clearly why, in the face of the human suffering we see daily in the media, we don’t act.  The promise of information to allow us to act in order to make the world a better place, is overtaken by paralysis. We are numbed by the degree of human suffering such that we are unable to act. Some might suggest that he is simply letting us all off the hook, but his clarity points us to a solution for our guilt-burdened hearts.

Zengotita engages in a dangerous dance with his audience. He could easily become too chummy with the Me-ness in all of us, but that seems part of his strategy. Even as he embolds us by the countless options to embrace the word ‘whatever’ and all it stands for, Zengotita engages that part of ourselves that still cares.

William Wallace
English and Media Teacher
Downsview Secondary School
Toronto District School Board
Toronto, Canada