I personally got from this book the understanding that human interaction is becoming increasingly mediated - and passive. So we go from tribal-agro-cultures wh

I personally got from this book the understanding that human interaction is becoming increasingly mediated - and passive. So we go from tribal-agro-cultures where the tribal group (say 140 people or so) interact with each other on a daily continuous basis. To our current situation where we spend a large proportion of our time interacting indirectly with our social group, passively observing the spectacle (newspapers, television news, gossip columns, fictional tv, documentaries etc.) and for many the direct (unmediated) interaction is limited to the nuclear family and maybe one or two close friends. In this sense we no-longer 'own' our lives as we have become extensions of the medium (and therefore the media) itself. Just like Marxism warns of the danger of a life mediated by the means of production so SI warns against life being mediated by the spectacle (that is a consensus world view created by a handful of people). The spectacle though is nothing new, it's been around a long time i.e. history is written by the victors - those that control the media provide the story into which we weave our lives. They describe who the bad guys are, who the good guys are, what is acceptable and what isn't. And it's woven into such an incredibly integrated way that we confuse it with reality. Of course nothing we experience is fundamentally real, that's basic neurology isn't it ;-) everything we experience is a construct of our senses in-combination with our perception. The vast majority of planet earth is empty void - yet we see everything as solid. But there are degrees of abstraction - and an authentic life (in the sense of Walden) is one with the least mediation. An example of the most direct experience is anything that allows you to focus on the actual sensory data and it's nature - this of course is the realm of insight meditation. At the other extreme is a life consisting entirely of TV consumption - and most of us somewhere in between. This all boils down to me as the question are you living your life or just watching it like so much television.