Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures David Castillo says the book was three years in the making. “You could now, in hindsight, think of this book as a prediction — not necessarily of Trump himself, but the Trump phenomenon.”
“Medialogies: Reading Reality in the Age of Inflationary Media,” co-authored with Johns Hopkins professor William Egginton, is already being praised. The esteemed European philosopher Santiago Zabala says, “Every epoch demands, expresses and is determined by a book. Most of the time these texts are noticed years after the fact .… But ‘Medialogies’ will have an immediate impact.”
Castillo says the 24-hour media cycle has produced a market where people can choose their own version of reality ” … and reality is actually being lost in the rising prominence of this new media culture.”
Castillo says the media is inflationary not because of a single message, but because its cumulative effect alters world views. Democracy is unsustainable in an environment where basic facts are ignored and people listen only to those opinions that agree with their own.
“President Obama alluded to this in his final State of the Union Address when he mentioned how the Soviets beat the U.S. into space. At the time, no one denied Sputnik or the science responsible for it,” he says. “But today polls show that most Americans deny climate change even though the scientific community is in near consensus about its threat.
“If we’re going to have a conversation about climate change or other serious issues, we have to realign the border between the visible and the invisible.”
Today we see a possible parallel in comedians like Stephen Colbert, who coined the term “truthiness” to refer to the phenomenon where reality is ignored in favor of individual truths.
He says the choice to remain in these media silos, protected and ignorant to what might challenge our world view, makes people complicit in their own blindness.
“As hard as it may be to engage in reality literacy, we can’t afford not to,” he says.