In Jim Carrey's 1998 film 'The Truman Show' a world is depicted where we unconsciously go about our day-to-day lives under the absorbing affect of the media. A false world where we are made to believe what we see, unconsciously or not. Mark Deuze's 2011 article 'Media Life' attempts to explain that our reality is indeed not that far separated from the life of Truman Burbank, by claiming that our lives too, our own reality, is no longer existant or we are oblivious to it because our lives have become so consumed within our 'media lives'.
We may live in a society where the force of media is so controlling that we never question, nor critique its presence or accuracy in our own realities. But when we begin to recognise the glitches in this media life, we can begin to question what reality and freedom actually is, and what it has become. Deuze explains "If we live our lives in media and we choose to take responsibility for it, what exactly are our options to constitute each other and ourselves in society, to be free and mediated at the same time?" (2010, 144).
One solution can be made: ignore it. Although he does make some valid points about how each personal can create multiple personalities of themselves and others, Deuze dramatically overestimates the control that media has on our lives. Sure, we might be oblivious to it, but according to most of the human race, we aren't living in a reality TV show, nor pretend to in our daily interactions with others. If we cannot properly understand how the media controls us, like myself, then why complicate the course of life by attempting to question it? As far as we're concerned, the realm that we are living in now IS reality, no matter how different it might seem to our nihilistic post-industrial academics.
Deuze, M. (2011). Media Life. In Media, Culture & Society, Volume 33, issue 1, pp. 137-148.
