Chapter 6 - Section IV and V Summary and Analysis

In section III, Boorstin returns to domestic issues and suggests that they are the opposite of foreign issues. Instead of nobody buying into the image, it seems at home that everyone has bought into the image, to the extent that we exist in a kind of pseudo-reality. Boorstin states, "We fill our lives not with experience but with the images of experience." He continues that even in our linguistics we have become more removed. The amount of dissociation has become so absolute that the "natural" no longer feels real. He states that we have even created words that imply the specialness of the natural such as "non-fiction" or "unabridged".

In section IV, Boorstin discusses the "mirror effect". In essence the mirror effect states that the more we create images in order...