This one made it into the book. I wrote the original version in 2008, during a period when I was living in Hawaii and taking anthropology coursework while also watching American media culture from a slight remove. It aged more accurately than I’d have preferred.
The essay starts with the question “Who am I?” — which sounds like the beginning of a philosophy lecture but is actually the question mass media is most invested in answering for you. Your name, your profession, your nationality: these are the surface answers. Underneath them is a much more interesting question about where the information your identity is built from actually came from, and who selected it.
Here’s the thing about mass media that wasn’t obvious in 2008 but has become impossible to ignore since: it doesn’t just report on the world. It constructs the categories through which you understand yourself. If you grew up watching certain television, reading certain newspapers, consuming certain narratives about what success looks like, what a family looks like, what a country is for, what you owe and are owed — those narratives didn’t just inform your views. They became the architecture of your self-concept.
The essay works through how this happens: through the people who surround us at our most formative, through the institutions we’re embedded in, and through the media — traditional and now digital — that frames reality at scale. The argument isn’t that media is uniquely evil. It’s that media is uniquely invisible as an influence. We notice the persuasion in an ad. We rarely notice the same mechanism operating in a news format or a genre convention or the framing of what counts as normal.
I was watching Americans from outside by then. From that angle, the constructed quality of American identity — its heavy reliance on media-delivered narratives — was much more visible than it had been from the inside.
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*This piece was expanded and collected in [Not My America: A Stranger in a Strange Land](https://www.amazon.com/Not-My-America-Stranger-Strange-ebook/dp/B0G3C44X7D/) — essays about America observed from the outside, by someone who left and couldn’t quite believe what he found when he looked back. Available in Kindle and paperback.*
**[Get Not My America on Amazon →](https://www.amazon.com/Not-My-America-Stranger-Strange-ebook/dp/B0G3C44X7D/)**
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**You might also like:** [Like Sands Through the Hourglass](https://www.vagobond.com/like-sands-through-the-hourglass-2/), [Five Seasons of Fellini – Amarcord](https://www.vagobond.com/five-seasons-of-fellini-amarcord/), [Never Mind the Bullocks…Where’s the Passion Fruit?](https://www.vagobond.com/never-mind-the-bullocks-wheres-the-passion-fruit/)
*Browse the full CD Damitio catalog at [indignified.com/books](https://indignified.com/books)*
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My books don’t fit in any neat box — because they’re about people who feel something huge is missing… and actually go look for it. Some even find it.
Dive into the full catalog and see which story hits you hardest. CD Damitio on Amazon.
CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA
CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.
