Reviews

Thomas de Zengotita (2005) Mediated: how the media shape your world

London: Bloomsbury. 291 pages. ISBN 0-7475-7085-X. £12.99 paperback.

Mediated by Thomas de Zengotita is a challenging book (to one's patience rather than one's intelligence) - the focus of which is: 'How the Media Shape Your World'. It confronts the very issues that threaten the continuation of life on this planet, but in a style that is playful and ironic, fusing the hip colloquialism of a college professor with an intense need at another level to be acknowledged by media academics.

His approach is to remain cool calm and connected: 'Ah those iPods. Plato would have flipped out'. Indeed de Zengotita's writing style could be described as 'American Bathetic': punchy sentences, fragmented paragraphs, with cute 'Hey' conclusions that peter out like piss in the sand.

De Zengotita asks us to believe that our lives are infected by media saturation, our digitised psyches unable to distinguish between reality and its representation. He begs important questions of the reader: 'is there anything you do that remains essentially unmediated, anything you don't experience reflexively through some commodified representation of it?' These are often leavened with a knowing smirk: 'Maybe you still buy pencils or paper clips just to use, and not because of what they represent, what they say about you'. De Zengotita argues that there are no authentic responses to reality left, since a return to pre-'mediated' innocence when our minds were stocked only with materials drawn purely from direct experience, is no longer possible: 'But there's no going back to reality just as there is no going back to virginity'. We are conditioned to a media-saturated state of permanent reflexivity, where according to de Zengotita even the British general public act as though they have taken Method Acting classes at Lee Strasberg's New York studio: 'Di's mourners were truly grieving and they were performing'.

Mediated follows in a tradition that started with Marshall McLuhan's The Mechanical Bride (1951), while the book's central premise - that representational technologies have 'colonized our minds' - follows on from Baudrillard. This book however is generally free of the jargon and neologisms of post-structuralism, whose intimidating language usually acts, as Robert Hughes points out, like a 'thick prophylactic against understanding'. If the book grates stylistically, it is for the reasons stated above: its relentlessly flip, parodic address make it a chore to complete.

The major problem inherent in the author's argument lies elsewhere. To make itself palatable to a wider audience, Mediated is startlingly uncontroversial. There are the usual grumblings about Dubya, liberal spleen about the Clintons, concerns about the weather and the Tsunami victims, and an elegy for the victims of 9/11, but no hard political or economic analysis. The book glides effortlessly across a sea of media representations, but misrepresents its subject by focussing on its surface rather than its underlying structures. If de Zengotita is genuinely concerned about the impact of American globalisation, some analysis of media ownership would have added substance to his evaluation of its pernicious effects, not just its impact on the citizens of the overdeveloped world, but also the consequences for the rest of the planet. The relentless march of Murdoch's media empire, the Enron/Pfizer/Halliburton/ GE/Exxon axis, the news stranglehold of CBS and NBC Universal are not addressed, and while de Zengotita extensively deconstructs Harry Potter, Leave it to Beaver, Winnie the Pooh and Peter Pan he shows less interest in the media excesses of CNN and Fox News, the implications of embedded reporting, American Newspeak, 'Shock and Awe' and War as Reality TV. But 'Mediated' is intended primarily for American consumption, and being dissident was more of a problem to a '60's guy with a retirement plan' when he embarked on this book than it is now, with Bush's star decidedly in the descendent, and the American general public reminded once again that the military - industrial complex also demands a domestic body count. De Zengotita's casual 'But enough politics. Let's have fun instead' rings more hollow than he intended at the time, and fewer pages on Co-ed dorms and 'Niceness as a core value' and more on the Bush family's dynastic wars would have broadened this book's appeal to the liberal audience that de Zengotita clearly aspired to.

'Mediated' has generally received very favourable notices from the broadsheet press, with media courses lining up to adopt it as a core text, if De Zengotita's website is any guide. There are a few demurring voices, including Russell Jacoby, Professor of History at UCLA, who was obviously frustrated by what he described as the 'post-it note' structure of the book. His counsel to De Zengotita, that he should watch less television while writing his next book, somewhat misses the point, but for all its qualities - and there are some strikingly lucid and eloquent passages in this book - it is in the end all too plausible, even as an account of the American experience. Life for most working people is grim enough under George Bush, and the day-to-day struggle leaves little time or energy for the non-confrontational, raised intonation patterns, and media-indoctrinated behaviour inculcated by American TV. The haunting image of America as a Night of the Living Dead, with a population consigned to a half-life of perpetual reflexivity is not recognisable beyond the covers of this book. The flood victims of Hurricane Katrina were always able to distinguish reality from its representation.

Roy Perkins, Southampton Solent University.