The Rise of the Pseudo Event”
At a recent family gathering, I noticed several of my relatives scrolling through their phones. Periodically, they would lean over to another relative and share what they were viewing. I happened to be positioned in the room to be in relative proximity to these sharing sessions. Although I am not a member of any social media site, I decided to take the plunge and ask one of my teenage relatives to show me what they were viewing. “Sure, grandpa…come on over.” Over the next half-hour, I was introduced to a steady stream of images across Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and X. Instagram centered on visual images of success, travel, and beauty. Facebook transformed personal life experiences into an archive of mini events. TikTok rewarded visibility itself—reaction became performance, and everyone was cast as a performer competing for attention. Twitter was the only site that appeared to be interested in current events, yet its dominant topics were not depth or understanding, but speed, volume, and provocation: being first, loudest, and most incendiary.
As I viewed each site, I could not get out of my mind the themes presented in Daniel L. Boorstin’s book, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. Although the book was published in the early sixties, his definition of “pseudo-events” fit perfectly into the images I was viewing, sitting next to my grandchild. Boorstin argued in the book that Americans were increasingly living in a world of manufactured images rather than direct experience or reality. These manufactured images promoted image over substance, celebrity over hero, the illusion of abundance, the marketization of experience, and turning politics, news, and public debate into performances. Each platform structured reality around how it appears, circulates, and is consumed—rather than how we lived it or understood it.
At the same time, I was reflecting on the themes in Boorstin’s book and the social media platforms I just viewed, I began to consider how schools might respond to a technological environment saturated with a steady stream of pseudo-events— an environment increasingly crowding out the habits of the educated mind. When I questioned my social-media tutors, sitting beside me on the couch, about how their schools were addressing the presence of these platforms in the classroom, their answer was succinct: “They ban our phones during the day.”
Having spent my career teaching and administering in public schools, I was not surprised by my social-media tutors’ responses. When institutional schooling perceives a threat to how it organizes curriculum and delivers instruction, its default response is to ban and regulate that threat. Rather than studying it- or, more importantly, asking hard questions about how the educational values and habits proclaimed in the school mission statement might counter or reshape it—central offices and classrooms rely on institutional procedures to keep the threat outside the classroom door.
Of course, the problem with this line of thinking is that the classroom door always swings open into a world dominated by pseudo-events, where young people are becoming accustomed to an artificial reality. The central stumbling block to a school- wide response to these media-saturated realities lies in institutions that have devoted their instructional platforms to the accumulation and documentation of ever-increasing amounts of information. In contrast, the habits of mind listed below—if taken seriously in curriculum deliberations and instructional practice—would begin to pose a fundamental challenge to the habits of the performative mind.
| Habits of the Educated Mind Reflection over immediacy Depth over attention Historical and contextual awareness Intellectual humility Judgment, not mere opinion Commitment to truth-seeking Resistance to extrinsic rewards |
Alan C. Jones 