released 9/19/2019

Thomas de Zengotita describes how the omnipresence of “representations” — forms of communication that have been deliberately manipulated and designed to address you—contributes to the widespread sense of entitlement and of identity as an autonomous chooser. The postmodern condition of being constantly addressed by advertising, emails, text messages, and television results in what de Zengotita calls “the flattered self,” a self, which if left unexamined, increasingly believes itself to be the center of the universe. In his book Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in It, de Zengotita identifies how despite our unprecedented ability to “make ourselves,” the overwhelming flow of images, options, events, and stuff generates feelings of helplessness, apathy, ambiguity, and resignation, all of which are often evasively expressed in the multivalent utterance “Whatever.”

(59 minutes)

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“Nietzsche was not thinking I.Q. or ignorance when he used the word ‘stupidity.’ He meant stupidity as in clogged, anesthetized. Numb. He thought people at the end of the nineteenth century were suffocating in a vast goo of meaningless stimulation. Ever notice how, when your hand is numb, everything feels thin? Even a solid block of wood lacks depth and texture. You can’t feel the wood; your limb just encounters the interrupting surface. Well, numb is to the soul as thin is to a mediated world. Our guiding metaphor. And it isn’t just youthful souls either.”

— Thomas de Zengotita, “The Numbing of the American Mind: Culture as Anesthetic” (Harper’s, April 2002)

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