Book Review: "Mediated" by De Zengotita

Melita

5 August 2007, 17:59

Tell me, can something still count as provocative if it’s tedious? If so, what adjective would you choose to describe it? Galling, maybe? Vexatious? Exasperating? Nettlesome? Irksome? Ballbreaking?

I should clarify the above adjectives aren’t at my instant beck and call. It would have taken me a good five minutes to come up with that list on my own. But with Dictionary.com it took me less than 30 seconds. ‘Ball-breaking’, though, was all me; it’s the best word available. Because Thomas De Zengotita’s Mediated broke my balls.

This is true even though, as his central idea describes, I have unlimited media choice due to the ‘mediated’ (get it?) informational environment in which we live. I’d love to tell you more about that central idea, but De Zengotita doesn’t make it easy. He writes like career arts academic who got frustrated with the thesis statement/proof/proof/proof/restatement form, let alone the thesis-antithesis-synthesis form, and disgorged his ideas pell-mell over the page in a fit of self-conscious rebellion.

But I’ll try. We live in the afore-mentioned ‘mediated’ environment. It provides us with almost unlimited choice in terms of our information. Therefore, it threatens to replace reality with the representation of reality. De Zengotita throws in an exculpatory mention of the billions of us living in environments too harsh to support ‘mediation.’

The risk of such replacement is real; there’s no doubt about that, and the sooner people are aware of the risk the better. Because there’s also no doubt that, despite recent improvements in public education in provinces like Ontario, where grade schoolers get classes in critical media analysis, we aren’t trained to be critical enough our information.

De Zengotita’s not here to help us out with that, however. His criticism of our ‘mediated’ environment is about as target-driven as a clock tower shooter. The book leaves the reader with the feeling that De Zengotita is profoundly uncomfortable in our modern media environment, not that there’s a profound problem with that media environment.

Let me give you an example. Through the book, De Zengotita works with the ‘Justin’s Helmet Principle.’ He expounds this principle by pointing out that once upon a time, in a less informed, ‘mediated’ era, a parent didn’t dream of making his children wear helmets whilst riding bicycles. Now, however, parents are informed by their mediated culture of the very real fact that bike helmets occasionally save lives. And surely that’s a good thing. And surely, in a broader sense, it’s a good thing that we live in a mediated culture: we’re better informed about many things that have the potential to make our lives easier or safer.

So on page 202 of my edition, during a diatribe about technical, computer-based multitasking, De Zengotita considers the possibility that such multitasking might not be such a bad thing; that following the Justin’s Helmet Principle it might in fact be a good thing. His answer to this possibility – a possibility that blunts his argument that an overly-rich informational environment insulates us unacceptably from reality?

“Still.”

I’m serious. That’s what we get.

In De Zengotita’s rush to condemn the entire mediated environment as inhuman or unacceptable, he spends hundreds of pages getting upset over phenomena he finds disturbing – the social ascendancy of young girls in junior highschool, his emotional reaction to a Chevy commercial, health clubs, political spin – without addressing the problems people might have with the idea that the entire mediated environment is inhuman or unacceptable.

The first, of course, is related to the Justin’s Helmet Principle, which he can explain but apparently can’t respond to. This problem is that the mediated environment has brought us incaluable benefits. If we were sufficiently critical to separate the informational wheat from chaff, our mediated environment would therefore be very, very acceptable; not unacceptable at all.

De Zengotita also writes about the second problem without responding to it, when he mentions in passing those of his critics who think there is nothing new under the sun, and that the mediated environment isn’t so very different to things people have experienced in the past. Dismissing such a point of view as crude and jumping into a discussion of something that looks like it’s about the tyranny of choice, De Zengotita refuses to get drawn into exploring the fact that a mediated environment is a profoundly human thing to be living in. The choice of voices is broader than it’s ever been before, but overarching voices preaching a gospel of information is about as new as the idea of religion or society.

Which brings us back to the question: what, exactly, is the problem with the availability of information, and the availability of choice? The answer that presents itself in view of the author’s career as an academic is an uncharitable one: that he personally has been made uncomfortable by the democratization of knowledge, by its availability even to those of us who haven’t been trained to use the formalities and resources he has. Not that those forms and resources stand him in good stead, in this great mess of a book.

It’s a great pity. His central idea – that our media insulates us from reality – is true and urgent. But cursing the whole edifice instead of encouraging a critical use of it is like celebrity Scientologists cursing psychology or right wing commentators sniggering about Martin Luther King enjoying the ladies. In a word – my choice of word among thousands – ballbreaking.

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