No Maps for These Territories Page #2

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It's increasingly difficult to find people

who have not been affected by media.

It's very difficult to find "non-mediated" human beings. Whereas,

in the 1920's, you could go back in the Appalachians and

record musicians who had never heard recorded music.

And I think that music, those early recordings,

sound fundamentally different.

Something very...something very different

was going on then. And something changed.

I remember once, I was very,

very struck by finding a diary entry,

finding a diary entry somewhere that...

a man had...a man had heard a Victrola for the first time.

An English clergyman had gone to a garden party, and he'd heard an Edison,

Victrola. And he'd come home and was just completely traumatized by it.

And he described it as being, you know...

he said that he had heard "A voice from Hell":

this "undead, hideous parody of the human voice,"

and that mankind was "doomed," and, "how could God let such things be?"

And he was, like, completely sincere.

I doubt if he would've had the same reaction, you know, the next time around.

But, you know, this diary entry caught him at exactly the...

on the cusp of the change.

We don't, you know...we don't find it extraordinary that

we can hear the voices of the dead whenever we wish to.

"Non-Mediated World" has become a lost country.

And I think that, in some very real way,

it's a country that we cannot find our way back to.

The mediated world is now THE WORLD.

We are that which perceives a mediated reality.

I don't think it's possible...I don't think it's possible to know what we've lost.

We just have...I think there is a pervasive...

there is a pervasive sense of loss,

and a pervasive excitement at what we seem to be gaining.

And they seem...those two feelings seem to go together,

in effect, to be parts of the same feeling.

It's like Frederic Jameson's "postmodern divide": you have it right there.

That sense of loss, and that sense of Christmas morning, at the same time.

I think that most people, myself included, are most comfortable, conceptually,

living about ten years back from whatever point in time we've reached.

And I think we all have these...these moments that

are vertiginous and terribly exciting,

and very frightening, in which we realize the contemporary, absolutely.

And I think it induces terror and ecstasy, and we retreat,

we retreat from it, because we can't stay.

We can't stay in that state of panic, which is,

I think, the real response to what's happening to us.

We're most comfortable with an earlier version of who we were,

and what we were. It makes us feel more in...more in control.

I think the last time...the last time I had one of those "CNN moments,"

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