Category Archives: Models

Examples we can productively study

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Knowing by Seeing

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             White House Meeting of the “Freedom Caucus”                     

The eye has now fully extended its dominance over the ear, occasionally with interesting results.

The idea that some people are “visual learners” is an old one.  But this observation has special relevance in our age where more media content comes to us in packages meant to be seen as much as read.  What this means in its simplest form is that to see is to know.  We  understand something as meaningful if it comes to us as an image or in a visual frame.  For example, there is new research that indicates that anti-smoking warnings on cigarette packages that include graphic pictures slightly increases the willingness of smokers to quit.

There are obvious and sometimes crippling disadvantages to the idea visual knowledge. Pictures are usually poor at capturing ideas: one reason that local television news often lives up to the dismissive phrase of a “vast wasteland.”  “If it bleeds it leads” is the old phrase that suggests the narrow focus. But for the moment let’s be more positive.  As various visual theorists have reminded us, “presentational media” have the advantage of no “access code.”  We don’t have to be literate to understand feelings and impressions given off by photographs or images.

Appropriation of a visual meme can equal stealing a sacred text.

Television as a pervasive daily presence has certainly played its part in making us ocular-centric. This shift dates from the 1950s, when it became a household necessity.  The new screen in the living room meant that family life would be changed forever. A second milestone in moving toward the visual was the consequential decision by Apple’s Steve Jobs to borrow (steal?) a Xerox research lab’s idea to use graphical interfaces for computers:  what we know as the colorful icons and “windows” that present web content with store-window vividness.   Add in video recording, DVD’s and easy-to-use cameras, and the transition to visual formatting of content was complete.  Especially for younger Americans, the eye has fully extended its dominance over the ear, to the extent that people will sometimes accept bad sound even while they watch super high definition video images.  It’s no surprise that the recent Pepsi ad campaign trading on the images of protest looked bad to so many people.  Appropriation of a visual meme can equal stealing and co-opting a sacred text.

People with good visual acuity can sometimes see what the rest of us might miss. That was surely the case with many readers of a 2017 New York Times column where Jill Filipovic asked us to take a closer look at a recent White House photo of a meeting of the “Freedom Caucus” members of the House of Representatives.  Vice President Pence posted the photo (above), proudly noting that deliberations were underway to replace the Affordable Care Act. No woman appeared in the photograph. What Pence saw as a fitting representation of orderly deliberation Filipovic understood as a representation of unabashed sexism:

For liberals, the photo seemed like an inadvertent insight into the current Republican psyche: Powerful men plotting to leave vulnerable women up a creek, so ensconced in their misogynistic world that they don't even notice the bad optics (not to mention the irony of the "pro-life" party making it harder for women to afford to have babies).

Filipovic went on to argue that that this male power play and its image was evidence of a powerful misogynistic streak. And we can only applaud her ability to see what some of us otherwise might not have noticed.  Reproductive issues are only some of many other concerns that uniquely affect a woman’s health.  White and well-heeled men have been occupying dominant decision-making roles for so long that we may not “see” the gender majority excluded from the room. Thanks to her sense of visual acuity, the group’s decision-making monopoly and hypocrisy looks even worse.

In the Bubble

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The decentralizing power of media after the 15th Century has been replicated again by digital media in the 21st Century.  We are in another cycle that defeats top-down cultural narratives. 

The history of human communication follows cyclical patterns of media development that sometimes throw members of a culture together, only to have newer developments pull them apart again. Thinking broadly, before widespread printing after the 15th Century the institutional church had informational dominance over most communities in the western world.  After that century, the clergy increasingly had to compete with printed manuscripts not under their control.

The same pattern repeated itself in the 1960s. At that time television networks had some of the same power of the medieval church. If citizens wanted to know what was going on in the world, they certainly had newspapers.  But if they wanted the immediacy of fast-breaking stories they only had two dominant television networks with mature news divisions.  For example, the bloody Vietnamese fighting of the aptly named “living room war” came home to Americans at dinner time via film rushed across the Pacific Ocean in time to air on the CBS Evening News or NBC’s Huntley-Brinkley Report.  Walter Cronkite and Chet Huntley were familiar chroniclers of its horrors. They usually had audience shares that news outlets today can only dream about.

What the printed book did after the 15th Century is being replicated with digital media in the 21st Century.  American lives are no longer dominated by the same cultural narratives.  Indeed, with the proliferation of choices online and on various video platforms it’s increasingly obvious that we have drifted into different “communities of discourse.”  That phrase is a slightly fancy way to say that the fragmentation of the informational world means that we no longer share a core of common national experiences.  Early moonshots, the Vietnam War, the World Series and even the Watergate affair in the 1970s were all defining events to be collectively celebrated or mourned.  Even the least public-spirited Americans could not help but be caught up in the net of their compelling stories.

All of this makes it possible to notice that we now have an informational universe that separates more than unites.  We are a nation that sees fewer events as compelling moments to be understood in the same way.

YouTube, Facebook, “Google Play” and are their clones will learn what we like, giving us more of the same and less of the alternate media and narratives that used to be baked into the national mix.

The evidence is all around us.  Most strikingly, and with many exceptions, younger Americans do not typically follow national journalism, which was the birthright of their more activist counterparts in the 1960s.  For many of these “post millennials” “news” has been redefined as a form of satirical or “reality” programming.  Similarly, films are increasingly budgeted and planned on the basis of their narrower demographics.  We have adult films, “tentpole” films built around serialized comics or toys, and some durable family features that try to bridge the divide.  But viewing a top Oscar winner is no longer a family event. All of this is symptomatic of the fact that Americans have retreated to bubbles of media content that can be customized to screen out the ‘wrong’ political attitudes, or to skip over materials meant for a distinctly different demographics.  YouTube, Facebook, “Google Play” and their clones will learn what we like, allowing even more information segregation, and omitting alternate narratives that used to be baked into the national media mix.

For most of us, but especially for some younger Americans, the bubble has shrunk even more to a word-starved social media world of friends they interact with or celebrities they “follow.” As a result, as college teacher I share less of the American cultural universe with my students than was the case even two decades ago.  We mostly follow very different paths through the cultural wilderness of popular music and popular film and video.  Hard news reporting has become an island that is rarely visited. In practical terms I can’t mention current and consequential congressional hearings, major presidential addresses or ongoing crises like the unraveling of the European Union, expecting that we are still in the same informational world.  And they might find me equally clueless about new musicians, video games, or new “breakout” performers.

The point is not to define fault, but to notice that if our society seems less like a society and more like a federation of tribes, that’s because it is indeed what we have become: changed by media developments that have made fragmentation possible and the once-potent judgment of “ignorance” passé.