Following the views of postmodern theorists that the media now represent a hyperreal world, one that is constructed/configured by media impressions of reality, the authors see the media as arbiters and editors of a world presented as a commodity to a public. They wed such perspectives to the growth of modernism, individualism, science's power to render things objectively, and the ... Read moreagency of artists to render the world subjectively ... Extending into today's politics, politicians like Trump copy images of America's past to apply to America's future. Media participate in acts of transformative reality, a series of codes parsing the world for personal consumption, making the real world I-world.
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Every epoch demands, expresses, and is determined by a book. Most of the time these texts are noticed years after the fact, as it takes generations of scholars and readers to acknowledge the extent to which they capture that epoch. But Medialogies, like Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus or Hardt and Negri's Empire, will have an immediate impact. The argument that humanities are not a luxury is in itself not new; but this book shows that they have become vital to our very survival as a species precisely because of how media frame, politically and culturally, our conception of reality. If Castillo and Egginton manage to express these theses with examples from TV series like True Blood, political events like the Occupy movement, or such writers as Borges, it is not only because they are brilliant academics, but most of all because they are true intellectuals, something that has become rare in the 21st century.
Santiago Zabala, ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at the Pompeu Fabra University, Spain
This volume pushes the boundaries of scholarship across an impressive subject range. Castillo and Egginton have constructed an adventurous set of ideas that provide challenging new insights into the ways the various media plays a key role in the formation of our contemporary reality.
Anthony J. Cascardi, Professor and Dean of Arts and Humanities, University of California Berkeley, USA
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