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thirst for reality, as exemplified by the current popularity of documentary soaps, role-
playing games and blogs. Contemporary media paradoxically try to break with the
sense of simulation by bringing audiences closer to reality, but this only replaces one
kind of simulation by another, since media function as mediators, not as mere inter-
mediaries, between people and their surroundings. The same goes for the relationship
between media and time. Media contribute to the polytemporality and dualism of
time in late modernity, but are also dependent on socially or naturally established
borders between different kinds of temporalities – borders they cannot all transgress
or delete. In the present state of modernity, people are always brought back to the ever-
present time layer of corporeal time – the anchor of any notion of real time. The refig-
uration of time by media narratives is always confronted with corporeal or real time
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by the act of reading, listening or viewing. These acts become a ‘necessary mediator
of refiguration’, as Ricoeur puts it, but without being able to completely tear down the
distinction between the time of narrative and the time of real life – or, for that matter,
between fiction and reality. 50
Media produce as well as abolish both time and space, but are also dependent on
them in order to function. This is hardly surprising, since society to an ever-
increasing extent consists of and is maintained by media. Hence, the separation of
society and media nowadays seems antiquated to the same extent that the notion of
human beings as cyborgs less and less seems a narrative of the future.