I think the meta thing really got rolling with Johnny Malkovich.  You can blame Spike Jonze for directing the movie and you can definitely blame meta-master Charlie Kaufman, who birthed that film as well as the naval-gazers Adaptation and Synechedoche (I'm sure I mispelled that - I may've mispelled "mispelled" - Synechedoche was the apotheosis of the genre, a movie with it's head so far up its rear, it was practically intussussepted). But I would maintain that by agreeing to appear as John Malkovich in Being John Malkovich, John Malkovich granted an imprimatur of authenticity to the whole meta enterprise - that is, the "am I really me or am I just an actor on the stage of my life" enterprise that is gathering momentum in the media day by day? More so than Jim Carrey in The Truman Show, which was more a commentary on the phenomenon than an actual example of it.  I recently watched the Showtime series Being Matt LeBlanc (aka Episodes) - it was very well done and had enough British humor to make it interesting.  But now there's a new sitcom coming to NBC's Thursday night lineup - Being Paul Reiser.  Mad about who?  Where does it all end? Girl Talk is making sound collages of previously recorded songs (incredibly interesting sound collages, but still...).  If Warhol were alive, he's be making painting of his soup can paintings - or maybe paintings of himself copying his soup can paintings.  Twitter and Facebook are nudging (buggy-whipping) things along at an accelerating pace and it's starting to feel like everyone is always on TV, like we're all perpetually plugged into the Matrix.  Will we all be Truman all the time? Can I even ask the question in a blog post - that will probably only be read by me.