I typically don't like to link to salon articles because anyone who hasn't subscribed has to endure a bunch of crap to read them, but this one is an exception. It's an interview with Thomas De Zengotita, author of a book about mediated culture. While recognizing the instinctive rejection with which many of us react to the perceived loss of genuine identity when confronted with the infinite reflectivity of the hyperreal, he argues that maybe this is not always such a bad thing. Profound stuff! Choice quotes:

It would be very interesting to find out what would happen to what remains of the left if their attacks on global corporate culture and Disneyfication could be separated from their concern for the misery of the millions of people who are exploited by or left out of globalization. What if you said: "OK, suppose you could ameliorate the living conditions of those people who are starving, dying, horribly, by the millions, and the price of that would be a global mall. Everyone would become mediated. Everyone would be politically correct. There'd be foolish tourists everywhere. There'd be no nature left. Everything would be an attraction site. The whole world would be Disneyfied. But there'd be no starvation." What would you choose?

One of his points is that in postmodern culture, we tend to live most of our lives as virtual method actors. Our choices become our "performances" -- the vain attempt of an overly flattered ego to imprint its image upon its surroundings by pretending to be what it already perceives as itself. This exhibition of self to self often ends up feeling existentially fake, yet there is no way out. It is only in the ever-decreasing areas where there is a lack of choice ('accident' or 'necessity'), that reality confronts us unhindered. But maybe this isn't really so bad:

There's the possibility of turning this whole idea -- that we're constantly performing our lives and riddled with self-consciousness -- into a virtue. Maybe we look back on our grandparents -- who had little sense of who they were, compared to us, they were just there -- and envy the authenticity of their being: I feel like such a phony compared with my grandfather. But then, on the other hand, you could look back and say, poor man, he was practically a zombie.

...

But notice how we actually do make efforts to achieve the pain that makes something real, as long as that pain is part of the choice we made. In our efforts to recover nature, for example, we get more and more extreme: boats across the Atlantic, cliff climbing for three days and nights, sleeping in nylon hangers, Outward Bound-type stuff, vision quest, naked on the mountain overnight. We seek raw experience precisely because it gives the feeling of the real. But the ironies are apparent. You're choosing to go out there and starve on a mountaintop. Not because your tribe will expel you if you don't or because you don't know what else to do, but because you want to feel real. So you take a reality trip, as it were.

He's hesitant to prescribe any firm solutions (or even to declare that we really have a problem), except to suggest that anyone who immediately attempts to declare that they have the answer is probably jumping the gun. Interesting stuff. I highly recommend the whole article. (I might even have to read his book.)