Mediated: Thomas de Zengotita on Postmodernity & the Flattered Self

On this MARS HILL AUDIO Conversation, Ken Myers and Thomas de Zengotita discuss 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 partiality for autonomous choice. 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.” $6.