It’s official. Pop culture has eaten itself. We’ve now got so far beyond the idea of merely being ‘media savvy’ that the cutting edge has blunted itself. Smart-arse ironic advertising has so deconstructed the traditions of the products they’re supposed to be promoting, all we’re left with are empty words. Not even empty promises, as there’s no promise to be had. Take Munchies. Or Chicken Tonight. The former, a chocolate snack, was rebranded with TV adverts that cunningly wondered aloud who’d thought up such a stupid name. The latter, a chicken flavoured cooking sauce, bemoaned their deliberately annoying theme tune even as it played. It’s like they’ve never understood the Ratner’s principle: confessing to your crapness doesn’t make people suddenly think you’re cool. It makes them think you’re an insincere, duplicitous idiot.

Like so many crisp bags, products are being repackaged more and more frequently, revealing less and less substance inside each time. We had, of course, reached a point where companies needed to be brought up to date, to be given a sheen of sophistication to keep up with their audience. But we’ve left something behind in the process. Nowhere is this more transparent than in politics. Sure, MPs – as the people’s representatives – need to be kept up to date with what’s happening in the real world. They could also, by large, do with a bit of a makeover, if only to give them the impression of being slightly more in touch. But that doesn’t mean they have to dress up their opinions likewise. It’s what they’re elected for after all. And, gullible as we are, we expect them to delve deeper into issues than mere soundbites might suggest. This is headline politics, where effectiveness is measured in three-inch high letters, and it’s happening everywhere from the UK government’s Iraq dossier to NASA’s Mars landings. As if anyone needed reminding, this is serious stuff, not that you’d know it. While Baghdad was still burning, some clever dick decided they’d sell cheap flights with the ingenious WMD pun ‘Weapons of Mass Distraction’. At the same time, the style media was using the resonantly gungho ‘Shock & Awe’ catchphrase to push nothing more than a pop album.

As for NASA: at the beginning of this year they told us they’d found conclusive proof of water on Mars. Impressive, but not as impressive as their declaration half a decade before that they’d found the existence of not just water, but life – in the form of a microscopic worm – there. But then again, they did have a mission to fund back then. And, once the Mars Explorer was on its way, they came clean that the worm, found on a meteorite, may have got onto the rock at some point after it had arrived on Earth from Mars.

Right now, anything we’ve ever had to feel passionate about – from politics to football to the music industry to celebrity culture in general – has had its heart ripped out. We can only hope that, as the sheen slips, and the people associated with those worlds are exposed as the preening, greedy fools that they are, something better might emerge. Already, the print media seems to be polarizing into two camps: at one end of the scale, we’re given Nuts and Zoo – Maxim and FHM without the wit that makes those products work. But at the other end, people are beginning to wake up to the fact that their readers can actually read. Magazines such as Carlos, Zembla, Inventory and Believer are brave enough to put their faith in the written word. Unsurprisingly, the last in that list comes from Dave Eggers’ independent McSweeney’s stable. But the first marks more of a ground shift in attitude. Carlos is a contract magazine for Virgin Atlantic Upper Class, which rather suggests the people with the money are getting a little bored with the thin surface sheen that our media age spreads over everything.

So maybe there is an ‘up’-side to all of this: we can still recognise and appreciate the real, unreconstructed stuff when we see it – even if that’s in some of the unlikeliest of places. Take two unlikely bedfellows: Michael Jackson and Boris Johnson. Michael Jackson has lived his life in the media eye all of his life, coinciding at a point when the media has become all powerful and all pervading. Before our prying eyes, we’ve seen him become moulded and shaped – first by others, then by himself – to fit the image that is demanded of him. And now he’s become a metaphor for the world we live in, a grotesque distortion invented for public consumption. The public has seen through the emperor’s new clothes (or the Georgian military uniform at least) and turned against their own creation. Boris Johnson, it’s safe to say, is different. Like Alan Clark before him, he’s proving that a spin-free, gaffe-prone politician – prepared to refer to themselves as a ‘Tory tosspot’ on TV – is more likely to win over the public imagination. Even if you disagree with their politics, they represent something that has been airbrushed out of the modern world: character. Boris Johnson may be ugly by all the media standards – from his appearance to his views – but maybe it’s about time we learned to accept and embrace the ugly a little bit more because it’s what makes us human after all.

I know what you’re thinking – none of this really matters, does it? But think about it. This is the Information Age, supposedly. And yet the information we’re getting is being polished until it’s lost all value. During another great age of enlightenment, Plato came up with the metaphor of the cave to explain our perception of the world. In Plato’s Cave, men were shackled so that they faced a wall. The shadows projected on the wall were the only glimpse they had of reality. If that’s not funky enough an allusion for you, think about The Matrix. The trick is to remove ourselves from our situation in order to perceive reality as it truly is. When the very medium by which we gain our knowledge is in question, maybe it’s time to find a different light source.