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February 29, 2004
Leap Day
The American citizen thus lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than its original. We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories to the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves.Pseudo-events from their very nature tend to be more interesting and more attractive than spontaneous events. There in American public life today psuedo-events tend to drive all other kinds of events out of our consciousness, or at least to overshadow them.
Before McLuhan wrote Understanding Media,
before Debord wrote The Society of the Spectacle, and
before simulacra were even a twinkle in Baudrillard's eye,
Daniel Boorstin published one of the most underappreciated discussions of contemporary media culture that most of us have never read: The Image: A Guide to Psuedo-Events in America.
Boorstin passed away today at the age of 89 (NYT, reg req'd). He's another one of those thinkers with whom I really can't agree with completely, but I can cite him as one of the thinkers who's suffered dramatically from our penchant for reading media theory in translation.
Posted by cgbrooke at February 29, 2004 11:49 PM