Younger generations already perceive reality as always mediatized by simulacra.

Evidence

Risking oxymoron, we might qualify this accommodation as ‘instinctively reflexive’: it has become obvious to large sections of the younger generations that everything we look at today is always-already mediatized by simulacra that result from diverse interests. If these generations can seem disconcertingly naive in one study or another, you can be sure that it is often because the questions asked could not coax them to repeat something that is so overwhelmingly obvious that it goes without saying: no need to reflect (for very long) to know that I only see (through) simulacra. When I travel, I follow advertising images, and I do so to take pictures to post on Facebook. My reflexive consciousness of the import of images does not require a moment of self-critical epiphany: it is at the very centre of everything I experience. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 470

Categorization

• XREF: Challenges both the moral-panic reading of naive youth and the Frankfurt School’s presumption that mediated consciousness needs critical awakening.