The Image in the Age of Pseudo-Reality
Boorstin, in The Image, coined not just the term “pseudo-event,” but also the epithetic descriptions “famous for being famous” and “well-known for well-knownness”; he was, it would turn out, an extremely reluctant herald of postmodernism.
.. images, he claims, are to us moderns what the printed word was to our forebears—and he attributes to its influence a dizzying array of pseudo-realities: the cheapening, and thus the wide availability, of printed books and magazines in the 19th century; the rise of the digest as a literary and journalistic form in the early 20th; the churning public demand for news and entertainment that arose from a glut of media sources; the rise of the celebrity as fodder for public conversation and speculation; the advent of image-driven modern advertising, which has encouraged, in turn, “our mania for more greatness than there is in the world.”
.. On advertising: “We think it has meant an increase of untruthfulness. In fact it has meant a reshaping of our very concept of truth.”
.. P.T. Barnum—whose core insight, after all, was not just that people could be fooled, but that, in fact, they wanted to be fooled
.. He knew, long before many others would learn from his tricks, the profound power of epistemic destabilization.
.. It might also, however, be the many, many people who gave their money to Phineas Barnum in exchange for the thrill of being lied to.
.. If Americans are living in a cave of our own making, even if we are offered the benefit of firelight, we might still choose the shadows.