• We are 'performance artists'. Our identity is the source of constant fascination from media producers who seek to find out what we want and will buy or 'buy into'.
• As our world is so image-conscious, many of us are now automatically aware of how to react to a video camera without learning 'video presentation skills'. This has the negative effect of making us 'hyper-aware' so that we will often behave as we are expected to as opposed to how we naturally feel. Therefore, a media event will be accompanied by the best reaction we can think of that accompanies our made-up identity.
• There is a blurring of the real and unreal. As an event such as 9/11 was prefigured by lots of disaster movies that saw major American landmarks destroyed in 90s disaster movies such as 'Independence Day', this made the actual footage of 9/11 quite a surreal event. This meant that people felt that they were actually part of a movie and could not figure out how to react due to the sheer 'movie-like' feelings that it inspired.
• Even children's literature is affected. Whereas early children's books such as 'Treasure Island' were adult's versions of an exciting story, books soon made children their leading stars as early as 'Peter Pan' and we learned a little more about what it was like to be a child. With the likes of 'Harry Potter' this understanding runs right through the book with popular references to other generation's childhood such as 'The Railway Children' and the 'Narnia' books.
• 'Hyper-reality' makes a number of strange things possible such as feeling nostalgic for an age we haven't lived through. As music from previous decades and TV programmes that reconstruct those times are now commonplace, this creates a strange sense of 'dislocation' from our current age.
• Whereas once, ages and decades would have been distinct and had their own character, now the freedom of information and 'access to everything' makes culture an 'indistinguishable blob' of all sorts of things brought together. Nothing seems to unify all of these many parts.
According to Zengotita, expressions such as the overuse of the word 'like' connote how we are unable to express anything original and we instead resort to referring to something else. He also comments on the way we are so unimpressed by wonderful imagery now and claims that “in the midst of a fabulous array of historically unprecedented and utterly mind-boggling stimuli ... whatever.” - Thomas de Zengotita
