The media present a realm beyond most people's experience or contact as the most significant dimension of contemporary life.

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Since today's media expand our horizons, putting us instantanteously in touch with developments from around the globe, we might reasonably  expect that they would tend to make us feel more confident about our knowledge of the world than previous generations, who lacked such impressive communications capabilities.

Curiously, though, their actual effect appears to have been quite the opposite.

We appear to have implicitly concluded  that the "bigger world"  our media keep so constantly in front of us is the center of all important action, while our own personal experiences in the small and isolated corners we inhabit are paltry and inconsequential details. 

Or to use a sporting metaphor, we seem to have concluded that what we see depicted in the media is the "major leagues," and what we ourselves experience is at best just farm club stuff.

We have consequently become so dismissive of the value of our own firsthand observations that we now tend to validate our personal, experiential reality against what's on a screen, rather than vice-versa.

And of course, if we the public regard what the media present as the core of significant experience, how can we expect the media themselves to think anything less of their work? They're more than willing to give us additional stories about their stories—the people behind them, the people involved in the telling of them, the people who produced the commentary on them, and on and on in an enterprise of sometimes mind-boggling self-referentiality.

(c) COPYRIGHT 1998 ROBERT WINTER.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.