Living as a Zombie in Media is the Only Way to Survive

Writing about yet another among countless polls, surveys, and reviews of people’s media use, Hamilton Nolan of the US-based Gawker blog expresses exasperation that all the breathless rhetoric in such reports boils down to one conclusion: "we’re all fucking zombies" (posted on March 27, 2009). References to people turning into zombies because of excessive media use tend to have negative normative connotations. I argue that living in, rather than with, media not only turns us into zombies, but that such zombification provides us with adaptive advantages for survival in the 21st century. As (media) zombies, we are better equipped to embrace collectivism over individualism; to be
anti-hierarchical rather than organized top-down; and to engage our mutual (media) worlds with passion and fervor without necessarily having a specific plan or goal in mind. In the end, the future of humanity as media zombies comes down to the question: if this indeed is a zombie society, what would be the mediated equivalent be of chopping people’s heads off? The answer can be found in practices such as hacking (the skillset of fandom) and in the morality of the collective.