E201. Thomas de Zengotita Thinks The Human Mind Is Not Made To Ingest This Much Media

Mediated Series - Part 4: Published in 2005, Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live In It , became Bridget's bible for understanding the changing media landscape and how it is affecting our society and behavior. Now she sits down with author Thomas de Zengotita for a multi-part series discussing the book chapter by chapter.

In Part 4 Bridget and Thomas discuss the extent to which children are fluent in mediated culture, the speed with which slang spreads, how the process of curating their social media profiles is kind of publicly inventing who they are, and how people can feel a kind of nostalgia for times they never lived in because they've lived in it representationally. They also cover the verbing of words, like "adulting," and how when you verb a word you're displaying the fact that you are aware of yourself as playing the role, how we've moved from risk-averse to risk-less world and there's an entire economy around taking away all risk, the value of psychobabble, when you need to watch out for the curmudgeon factor, how misery is enhanced by online comparisons of your own life with other lives, and why Thomas is more optimistic now than he was 20 years ago.

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