Of all the speakers featured at DUX, there was one who stood out among them all: Thomas de Zengotita. This is not a slight to the other speakers, as there were a number of outstanding addresses. But de Zegotita’s talk was fascinating in content, delivery, and style. Neither doctoral candidate nor corporate researcher, rather a crotchety professor who delivered his talk without aid of a slide show or other visuals. This alone made him stand out. But more meaningfully, he was able to take many of the disparate ideas we’d been exposed to over the prior three days and synthesize them into a coherent and compelling narrative. Here is my take on his lecture:

Living in a Mediated World

The fundamental premise of his talk was our existence in a mediated world (”a web of preferences that both vies for our attention through shameless flattery and offers us the opportunity to construct identities based on what we buy”) and how that affects how we see ourselves and thus everything else that we do. De Zengotita argues that the written word is the foundation of this mediated world. It was, he says, the act of reading and writing that enabled individuals’ sense of autonomy, of freedom within one’s own mind.

The growth of that seed into our universe of signage, individualism, consumption, and - of course - media of all sorts has given rise to our modern Celebrity Society, a world where one thing we (as spectators) share is our awareness of celebrities.

But now, with the rise of social media, that paradigm is morphing again. Look around you: We are all staging our own lives with ourselves as the star. This is manifested in many ways: In video games, where the player is the star and spectator at the same time; On the social web, with our own web pages that celebrate everybody - and our circles of friends; through blogs, YouTube videos, and a seemingly endless stream of new technology.

The Flattered Self

Our mediated world has birthed the rise of the Flattered Self - an entire culture dedicated to inciting and then placating the desires and ears of the individual ego. Advertisements, entertainment, friendships and even jobs must somehow address our unique needs.

De Zengotita asserts that representations of all kinds, by their nature, address our egos. Signs tell you where you are and how to get where you want to go. Advertisements register with our emotionally. Even your co-worker’s comment on your Facebook photo serves this paradigm. But it can be overwhelming.

Of course, we can’t all be celebrities, can we? In the mediated age, attention is the only scarce resource. So it becomes necessary to filter the tidal wave of information and representations. And our media consumption technology is serving this need - email, iPods, Tivo, and RSS all help us control our media intake. Here de Zengotita acknowledged David Peskovitz’s concept of sipping from the Information Firehose.

The Age of Fusion

Now that we have achieved nearly absolute control over the content, style, and timing of what we consume, where do we go? More personalization. We are now in the Age of Fusion. From remixes to mashups, genre bending rules. But why? Because everyone is making stuff out of what is around them., and all creators are looking for some way to be original.

So even creation is mediated. But haven’t things always been mediated? That is, even language itself is a medium. Perhaps. But the sheer quantity, quality, and ubiquity of media is now so awesome as to be inescapable. It was only in the 60’s, de Zengotita says, that realizing that everything is mediated became common sense. This an extremely subtle, but radical distinction.

Extreme modern examples of both the Age of Fusion and a Mediated world include transgenderism and body modification. The reality that even the most basic building blocks of identity and even physical being can be mediated, altered, and ultimately determined by the individual is a profound shift in which we have taken the first steps toward replacing God with ourselves.

Conclusion

It is overly ambitious, I think, to attempt to summarize this broad-reaching lecture. But I did take away several key ideas:

• A Mediated World: Any attempt to understand modern design, culture, or media must first adopt the Mediated frame. That is being self-aware of our environment as largely, if not completely, filtered.
• Celebrity Society: is both an outgrowth and driver of the modern individual’s need to feel recognized, flattered, and celebrated.
• Age of Fusion: media, cultures, and individuals are no longer bound by predetermined limitations. With modern design culture, the means of production have fallen into the hands of the workers, who now posses the power to mold media, society, and self.