Just when you thought there was nothing new to say about the media, along comes a book that transcends the conventional wisdom with an original vision. From Princess Diana's funeral to the prospect of mass terror, from oral sex in the Oval Office to cowboy politics in distant lands, from high school cliques to marital therapy, from hip-hop nation to climbing Mount Everest, from blogs to reality TV, Mediated takes us on a tour of every department of our media-saturated society. And at every turn we see ourselves as we are, immersed in options, surrounded by representations, driven to unprecedented levels of self-consciousness - and obliged by these new circumstances to transform our own lives into performances. Sophisticated and satirical, written with style and driven by raw energy, Mediated tackles everything we take for granted and reintroduces us to the world we think we know as if for the first time. Norman Mailer on Mediated: Mediated has the same liveliness and intense intellectuality as Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media - which is a way of saying there are anywhere from three to ten stimulating ideas on every page. As McLuhan presented us with the realization that modernism was coming to an end, so de Zengotita has a great deal to say about the saturation of post-modernism in our existence today. Let me offer my salute to Thomas de Zengotita.