On The Media: Transcript of "Me is for Media" (April 20, 2007) BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I don't want to diminish the horrific experience that those people went through, but it did seem at times as if they were reading lines from a script, almost as if they'd been through all this before.

THOMAS de ZENGOTITA: Right.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And we have a couple of examples of that.

FEMALE STUDENT: This is something that no one will ever get over. I mean, the people who died, yes, they’re, they’ve finished their pain, but the pain for everybody else will go on forever.

MALE STUDENT: It’s just insane. That’s just, that’s such a big number. Like we were already saying this is just like a college Columbine. This is, it’s just really sad.

THOMAS de ZENGOTITA: Yeah, those two particular individuals, there’s no question in my mind, just listening to their voices, that they understand they’re in a drama, as well as something real. It’s a fusion of reality and representation. I call it the “story event.” The story shapes the event. The event shapes the story. It unfolds in real time, just the way the kids who were trapped in their various classes were reporting on their cell phones simultaneously as the events unfolded, and hearing themselves on their own laptops reporting through MSNBC on themselves.

As usual, On The Media asks the really interesting questions of the right people. The idea of perceiving event through other events - a sort of negotiated grieving - is very consistent with the concept of conceptual integration. However, I think it is probably mistaken to locate it purely in the media age.

THOMAS de ZENGOTITA: I think Kennedy's assassination was the first story event. I think that was the first time in history where, you know, millions and millions of people who weren't anywhere near some traumatic event of this kind - like say Pearl Harbor for comparison – you know, began to tell stories as if this had happened to them.

I suspect that a more detailed analysis of past "pre-media" events would reveal a similarly scripted involvement although the scripts would look rather different. This is probably a result of a universal (if culturally heavily parametrized) human drive to view everything as something else. Most rituals could probably be redescribed in those terms. Of course, the real question is what role this kind of analogical (metaphoric) thinking plays in different contexts. For example, in the modern world, ritualizing the inner experience of event viewers seems to be different from rituals in less mediated societies where most of the ritualized experienced deals with the experience of the group. For instance, grieving rituals (with exaggerated expressions of sadness, professional mourners for hire, extravagant burials, etc.) are often aimed at public display with the purpose of integrating a death into the processes of the group, whereas the ritualized displays of private grief played out in TV shows (ritual plays) are aimed at showing individuals how to integrate the death of someone into their private inner processes, mostly away from the group. The analogical principles, however, remain the same. (It should also be said that by its very nature, every ritual has a public component, so it is possible that upon closer inspection even this private inner mourning is really a matter of public concern.)