"The Image: A Guide To Pseudo-Events In America" is a book about where perception and reality harshly collide in American culture. On one level it's a history of public relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and on another level it's a prophesy of an American society yet to come. The thesis: that at some point in past decades, public relations professionals discovered that invented news was sometimes more effective than the real thing, and so "newsworthy" events gradually became the products of a manufacturing industry. If the trend continues, Boorstin points out, there will come a time when journalism and entertainment will merge in America - where the goal is no longer to tell the truth, but to get and maintain the attention of an audience.

What makes this such an interesting position is that Daniel Boorstin first made this argument when "The Image" was originally published in 1962. He wrote it after watching the first televised presidential campaign; the story he tells was inspired by the use of media power in the early days of the Kennedy administration.

The future he was pointing to is our present.

The cornerstone of this book is the pseudo-event: a manufactured happening that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy through media exposure, such as a true-life example Boorstin documents involving a PR campaign aimed at boosting the business of an old hotel. The hired public relations firm gathered prominent city leaders onto a "recognition board", discussing ways to recognize the hotel's upcoming anniversary. The local media carried it as a news story (since, of course, the leaders wouldn't have established such a board if the hotel wasn't prestigious), and the media coverage boosted the hotel's business and prestige. The "anniversary celebration" was an entirely manufactured event aimed at creating an illusion - an image - that would become real in retelling.

Going back to colonial America and extending to modern day, Boorstin carefully tells the tale of how the commercial need to stay financially competitive drove the journalism profession away from simply reporting events and closer to actively creating them. He painstakingly dissects the pseudo-event and it's cousin, the celebrity ("A person known for their well-knownness"), logically extending this century-long trend into a future in which artificial pseudo-events have almost entirely driven out the authentic and spontaneous from everyday American life.

"The Image" is a relatively short book and, to my mind, a vitally important read for anyone in the field of professional communication today. It's not a book about solutions; readers who agree with the thesis aren't going to find blinding insights on how to fix the problems of modern culture. As Boorstin points out, that sort of wish fulfillment is the result of the very problem that requires a cure.

Instead, this book is a mirror, a mechanism for clear perception and a bit of context for a culture that often jettisons context as fast as possible. By seeing what is, rather than what we'd like to see, he says, we can steer back closer to truth - away from pseudo-events and back to the real and valuable. "The Image" is a diagnosis that every communicator today should heed and take closely to heart.