It’s worth stressing here that the shift from the storytelling to commentary—from host organism to parasite—is more than just standard-issue postmodernism. The television shows that have gravitated toward metacommentary in the past few years have done so not because they have given up on “the real,” as the French psychoanalysts like to say. They have attached themselves to the mass-media body because the mass media is now a fundamental, irreversible component of their everyday life, as inescapable as as all the old inescapables—sex, death, taxes, you name it. The infosphere is now a part of our “real life”—which makes commenting on it as natural as commenting on the weather. The older tradition of media criticism—Daniel Boorstin’s classic work The Image being the ultimate example—sees the tendency for self-reference as a kind of hall-of-mirrors effect, where the real body politics of face-to-face existence slouch toward a vanishing point of endless reflection. As Doug Rushkoff puts it in Media Virus: “Philosophers who grew up before television… view media or even technology, for that matter, as something outside the realm of the natural. To them, media can only display or comment on something real. They cannot acknowledge that the media is something real itself, something that exists on its own and that might have its own needs and agendas.”
— Steven Johnson. Interface Culture.San Francisco: HarperEdge, 1997. page 29.
