Page 211 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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196 Now
Conclusion

Accustomed to live in a world of pseudo-events, celebrities,
dissolving forms, and shadowy but overshadowing images, we
mistake our shadows for ourselves. To us they seem more real
than the reality … Our technique seems direct only because in
our daily lives the pseudo-event always seems destined to
dominate the natural facts. We no longer even recognise that
our technique is indirect, that we have committed ourselves to
managing shadows. We can live in our world of illusions.
Although we find it hard to imagine, other peoples still live in
the world of dreams. We live in a world of our making. Can we
conjure others to live there too? We love the image, and believe
it. But will they?
(Boorstin [1961] 1992: 249)
they don’t draw careful distinctions between democracy as a
system of government and democracy as a form of
entertainment … The automatous machinery of the electronic
media makes a ceaseless and sometimes joyful noise, but to
whom does it speak, and in what language? And why – behind
the splendid twinkling of the whirligig façade – is the silence so
loud?
(Lapham 2001: xii)

The events analysed in this chapter suggest that the answer to
Boorstin’s above rhetorical question is ‘no’. Similarly, Lapham use-
fully summarizes our contention (contained within the notion of
social porn) that the pervasive reach of the culture industry into the
traditional realm of the discourses of sobriety has profoundly negative
political consequences that Benjamin severely underestimates in his
Essay. The obsessively repetitive attention paid by the media to
pseudo-events obscures the deeper social issues of which they are only
reflections. Although the media’s obsession with celebrity lives and
deaths appears relatively benign, this chapter has demonstrated the
much more serious geopolitical effects from the strike against
understanding fostered by the contemporary society of the spectacle’s
Ratio and reflected in such pseudo-events as the 9/11 tragedy and the
toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in the centre of Baghdad.
Against audience-empowerment theorists, no matter how forceful or
persuasive they are in purely critical terms, counter-hegemonic
readings of such media products as Saving Private Lynch struggle to
compete with the pre-primed nature of the values seamlessly com-
municated by the sophisticated tele-frame of the contemporary
culture industry. Even if the manufactured drama of Private Lynch’s
rescue had been true, it is more than simply churlish to point out
that various insidiously cynical pre-programmed responses are neces-

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