A Review of Mediated: How the Media Shape Your World by Thomas de Zengotita.

This is a scintillating, exhilarating ride of a book. If you’re interested in blogging, or any aspect of the media, new or mainstream, you shouldn’t miss it. The author is an academic in New York with a PhD in anthropology. He began his career as a Method actor.

In the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas — which was not included in the New Testament by the politicians of the Roman Empire for being too mystical — Jesus says, “Become a disciple of your own mind”. That was probably the last time anything so Buddhist appeared in official Christian literature.

Although Zengotita doesn’t use it, the saying applies very well to his book, providing the subtext beneath (as Shakespeare might have put it), “All the world’s a stage, and we are merely players”.

Zengotita begins in November 1963, when he was a student Method actor in New York. One day, a teacher entered the room and said, “President Kennedy’s been shot.” Then left.

The students took it for an exercise and started rolling their eyes, lifting their arms to heaven, keening and wailing and, presumably gnashing their teeth. As actors do. Thirty minutes later the teacher entered again. “The President just died.”

There was a stunned silence as the students realized it was really true. Then they started writhing on the floor and weeping and groaning all over again.

Zengotita draws the conclusion that this was new to our culture : extreme emotional reactions to the death of someone we didn’t know and had never met — except in the media.

He believes we have now reached the stage where we are totally immersed in media images which “mediate” all our reactions, feelings and belief systems. Instead of confronting reality directly, as Thomas’s Jesus urges us to do, we are just corks bobbing about on the choppy waters of mass media, which permeates us and drowns out our own perceptions.

This mediation has become all but total and has massive implications for the way we live. Marshall Mcluhan’s “The Medium is the Message” was only the half of it. How else would we tolerate the suffocating injunctions of “political correctness” were it not for the almost total power of the media to project it into the mass mind, and therefore our own.

Psychological contagions are every bit as destructive as pathogenic epidemics. In the 1930s, Fascism spread like wildfire around the world, leading to yet another world war. It was the counter-culture to another psychic contagion, Marxism, which all but became a religion : the Radiant Way. We had been warned.

Norman Mailer puts it well, “As Mcluhan presented us with the realization that modernism was coming to an end, so Zengotita has a great deal to say about the saturation of post-modernism in our existence today.”

The death of Princess Diana, with its worldwide Mexican wave of shock, was a typical example of this phenomenon in action. So was the very recent hubbub over the grisly end of the croc-baiter, Steve Irwin. These are not rational reactions. They show us as mediated characters, receiving our grief second-hand.

The world and life as a performance has become the norm. We are now used to seeing everything through the lenses of others. We’ve become part of a World Mind, instead of using our own. In the face of this, what can be done?

We can become a disciple of our own mind. Zengotita’s wonderful book makes a solid contribution to our belated understanding of this eerie phenomenon.

I’ve just heard that Douglas Harding died last night. Anyone who follows the outer edge of spiritual philosophy — as I do — will know Douglas as The Man With No Head, after a famous book he wrote ages ago.

It’s a strange concept and takes a bit of work to get your head around, so to speak. But a moment’s insight indicates that everyone has a head except us. We appear to look out from one, but we can’t actually see it. We seem to be floating in a void slightly above a headless body.

That was the basis of Douglas’s thesis and teaching method over at headless.org.

Even stranger to tell is that I got this news from Dave Winer’s site, Scripting News. In a million years I would never have guessed that he would be into the extended mind and headlessness. But you can never know with these Californian types. Even the intellectuals have the second sight down there it seems. It could be a whole new career for him when he finally retires from developing Web 2.0 stuff. Let’s hope so. Dave Winer without a head would be a real spectacle.

Our commiserations to all Douglas Harding’s supporters.

Compared with my childhood, Christmas has almost disappeared from view.

In Britain, Birmingham City Council celebrates “Winterval” instead of the usual “Xmas”? That line is being followed up and down the country, egged on by laws emanating from central government. Is political correctness once again attacking the bedrock of our values and culture?

The answer is, yes, of course, because the PC agenda is basically Marxist and seeks to destroy every vestige of “bourgeois” existence. Western governments, particularly in Europe, are now dominated by Marxoid genuflectors whose every impulse is to root out the middle-classes and their way of life.

But is it more complex than that? Take this year as an example and using old-time language for better comparison :

In 2006 we’ve had a vicious war in the Holy Land, plus a Mahdi uprising in Mesopotamia. Sunni rebels have been fighting a bitter civil war against a dispersed Shia army in the lands between the Tigris and the Euphrates, with British and American troops caught in between. Meanwhile, in a resurgent Persia, a wild dictator is building a doomsday weapon to wipe an entire nation from the face of the earth. John Buchan or the Bible, take your pick.

Why then would we want to be reminded of the Middle East during Christmas?

And yet, remember those old-fashioned Christmas cards with the three wise men in their long robes and beards? Nowadays we see them as Osama bin Laden lookalikes. The timeless Biblical scenes of our youth, once so popular, remind us of the mujahideen rather than peaceful spirituality.

All over the Western world there’s a major retreat from Christianity. In America, probably the most ardently Christian nation on earth, you’ll only hear “happy holidays” these days, with scarcely a mention of Christmas.

Is it that we are shying away from the whole Middle East ethos? Has 9/11 changed the very nature of who we think we are? It may be that we no longer see the deserts south and east of the Med as benign. They never were, of course. But where does that flight from religious romanticism leave us?

Well, we could easily develop a Christianity without a Middle-Eastern favour, if only our Church leaders and others would recognize the problem.

Many of the early Gnostics, for example, like the Essenes and the Therapeutae, were “Christians” before the time of the historical Jesus — if he was a person rather than an archetype. Their ideas derived more from ancient Egypt and Greece than what we once called the Holy Land. It was the Roman Empire that stamped an ersatz “Christianity” on the rest of us to bolster its own power.

Rather than throw out the baby Jesus with the holy bathwater by adopting contrived festivities, like Winterval, a Christianized version of the Scandinavian Yuletide would be far more preferable, with European and American traditions overlaying a Gnostic, Christian spirituality.

Of course, the merry, Dickensian, English Christmas as imported by Prince Albert is the best of the lot. It’s a subtle blend of Celtic holly and mistletoe, with a big German fir tree, ample wine and ale, and boards groaning with non-vegetarian roasts and bakes. I’ll settle for that.

A very Merry Christmas — with a bit of Gnostic nostlagia thrown in — and a Happy New Year to all Syntagma readers.