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 been following the travails of some blogfreaks who have piled into Wordpress 2.1 while it’s still wet behind the ears. Not a pretty sight (or “site” — either will do).

I’ve also read a few posts on what it contains. Very impressive. But one “improvement” caught my sparrowhawk eye : changes in the table structure of the database which may cause some favourite features to implode.

Call me old fashioned, but it’s that word “implode” which jumps out at me. I’m an old hand at imploding websites, probably having imploded more than the average online tinkerer. One thing I know about implosions — they are virtually impossible to get out of without starting again at the very beginning.

Imploding 50 Wordpress websites is definitely not on my list of priorities.

So the Wordpress team, or community, as open-sourcers prefer to call themselves, can keep their implosions to themselves. Thanks, but no thanks, guys.

All is not totally lost, though. One of the Wordpresseers, Lorelle VanFossen, has compiled a magnificent article on the trials and tribulations of 2.1. It contains enough hard information and instructions to put me off for several lifetimes.

Update : You thought I was going to chicken out, didn’t you? Well, I’ve just updated our test site to Wordpress 2.1 with no problems at all, except that our version of “Subscribe to Comments” doesn’t work. There doesn’t seem to be a problem with the database either, updating from 2.0.5.

I think the problems stated in the articles are for high-tech users who run very sophisticated scripts and plugins. But, for us, no implosions yet, although I can’t get the call to the sidebar to work in the single post template. Any ideas, anyone?

Google PageRank
Jumping quickly back to the Google PR regrade. All of our newer sites now have PR4, and some later ones have regressed to that. The Google dance is still going on, apparently.

However, I’m noticing that many other sites have been pulled back — even The Blog Herald has lost its PR7 and recoils to a 6. There’s clearly something in the new algorithm which penalizes interlinked networks and possibly text link ads too.

As a commercial network, we’ll just have to accept that the Google model index is now downgrading business and blog networks.

You have a choice, it seems : you can have great PR in the poorhouse, or you can earn income with a poor PR.

Take the money and run.

We have been preparing for our ultimate incorporation for some months, pausing only to ensure we have the right balance of elements and sufficient profitability to sustain a much larger operation. However, with our new design currently in hand by Thord Hedengen, it seemed the right moment to declare our new structure, which will be progressively implemented in the second quarter of the year.

Syntagma Media will split into two operating divisions. The first, Syntagma Digital, will contain all our online properties — some 53 websites — including, three network magazines and the (currently) top secret plans codenamed, iSyntagma.

The second new division of Syntagma Media is named Dial Publishing and will handle all print and other offline publishing and consulting work. This side of the business is set to swing into action in Q3 and Q4 of this year.

It always amazes me the amount of work involved in changing even the smallest sliver of a fully-functioning business, so we do this sparingly at all times.

But the time has come to launch : Syntagma Digital.

Since last evening, Syntagma has received around 700 spam comments, all of which ended up in our moderation panel.

A large majority of them begin : “Actually i am not an active serfer [sic] …” Well, they could have fooled me.

This has been going on for more than a week. Since none of them has got past the spam traps even for a millisecond, may I suggest these people save a little on their electricity bills and find something productive to do.

Anyone else having problems with this spammer?

Update : In the three minutes it’s taken to write this post, another 10 “Actually’s” have appeared in the panel. It’s a Biblical plague.