Life, Death, and Media

“Media” refers to actual stuff, like books and magazines and movies, and also less tangible stuff, like websites. But the word has the same root as “mediate,” which is to say, it refers to some non-real strata sandwiched between pieces of reality. Media, by definition, is not real; it is the mediation of other, realer things.

This morning, on my way to work, I was nearly killed by a van that aggressively turned in front of me as I was crossing the street. I banged on the side of the van as it passed. It stopped. A man got out of the passenger side. The driver, apparently no longer in a hurry, idled the van in the middle of the street while the passenger walked over to me. He extended his finger like a gun and pressed it against my forehead. “You’re lucky,” he said. Then he turned around and walked back to the van, which drove away.

At first, this event seemed like most interesting thing that has happened to me in months. I spent the rest of the day thinking about it. It had felt real. Had I fully taken advantage of it? Should I have said or done something differently?

And yet, after a few hours, I realized that there had been a lot of theater involved. The finger-as-gun didn’t seem like a reference to any actual gun, but rather to a tradition of fake guns in fake situations that I was expected to have absorbed, and taken seriously. He wasn’t the driver of the van, and so I actually had nothing against him; the driver, whose face I never saw, was obviously watching through a side-view mirror (mediated).

image by satanoid