The Media Mediates

There is definitely the sense that the media can mediate (!) the experience of viewers after the thing has happened. I might be sitting at home in North Carolina, watching the program and think one thing, and then the guy with a tie and “expertise” might come on right after it’s over and say with great gusto that one person or another has done something radical and race-changing that I never even considered. I often think of a great art museum in Boston when I think of these debates re: media mediation of the outcome — Isabella Stewart Gardner, a wealthy woman way back, arranged for her home to be turned into a museum when she died but left express instructions that there be no captions on any of the pieces of art, so that visitors would only have their own senses and minds with them when they looked at everything. She didn’t want scholars ruining it for them; she wanted the experience to be pure. There’s something to that...