Our Mediated Life

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Our Mediated Life

Do the means by which we communicate determine the kind of people we become? To what degree do media affect our thoughts and behavior? What is the long-term cumulative effect of daily exposure to ads, images, trailers, headlines, blogs, vlogs, clips, clicks, links and bites? What is the psychic effect of constantly seeing the most dissimilar images bunched together, the most disparate pieces of news threaded into one incoherent and titillating whole?

Manila protest Woman with peace sign painted on her face stands in front of protesters carrying giant peace flag in Rome.

"There are no remote places. Under instant circuitry, nothing is remote in time or in space. It's now."

-- Marshall McLuhan, quoted in Forward Through The Rearview Mirror, edited by Paul Benedetti and Nancy DeHart.

"The situation is very embarrassing. It's difficult to denounce a universe that has rid itself of the subject, salvation and transcendence. What can you do in a universe without transcendence, other than partake of this kind of dynamic immediacy, of effectuation of the world in digital terms?"

-- Jean Baudrillard, Fragments

Saddam Hussein

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Shaquille O'Neill Eminem (© Aftermath)

"The mass man is not the vulgar or the stupid or the unthinking man, but anybody and everybody who experiences the electric situation of instant information."

-- Marshall McLuhan, quoted in Forward Through The Rearview Mirror

1970s wasteland - Alphabet City

Photograph of Usama Bin Laden

"Because the camera sees but cannot think, it doesn't matter who sings the undying songs of love, or whether the twenty-four-hour circus parade goes nowhere except around in circles. Nothing necessarily follows from anything else; what is important is the surge and volume of emotion, not its object or its subject...Narrative dissolves into montage and knowledge becomes a matter of instantly recognizing the iconography (Osama's beard, the Nike swoosh, Ralph Lauren's polo player, Howard Dean's upraised fist); history reverts to myth, and politics collapse into the staging of pageants sometimes accompanied by a fall of brightly colored balloons."

-- Lewis Lapham, Harper's Magazine (May 2004)

Teach Peace - Study War No More (Peace Sign) - SOA T-SHIRTS