Flight Attendants at Singapore Airlines. Source: Wikipedia.org
Fronting is the requirement to represent in speech and body language the interests of others who have a specific lexicon and level of enthusiasm they want you to employ.
Most of us have heard writer David Sedaris’ story of gaining seasonable employment by becoming one of Santa’s elves in Macy’s New York store. It’s funny in part because we know that it cannot be easy for a sardonic man to put on green tights and prance around in fake snow. The job comes with the built-in need to be a happy supplicant to overstimulated children and demanding parents. As Sedaris first explained it on NPR’s This American Life, he mostly did his part. But each time we read or hear the tale we are aware of the yawning gap between the prickly man and the fantasy of simple innocence he’s required to enact.
This imperative to perform in a non-congruent role has a name: fronting. It’s a handy term because it identifies one cause of the angst we experience when a communication task seems daunting. Specifically, fronting with apparent conviction is often a lie, made worse if we’re born with a strong sense to recognize our own hypocrisies.
Formally, fronting is the requirement to represent in speech and body language the interests of others who have a specific lexicon and level of enthusiasm they want you to employ. It’s the primary job skill for work in customer service, sales, teaching, lawyering, and most forms of inter-organizational communication. Typically, in manufacturing engineers will front and protect each other, not necessarily revealing departmental differences to the sales people one floor up. Professors front for their disciplines to students or deans. Lawyers remain the very picture of client loyalty, even when they have significant doubts. And let’s not forget restaurant servers, who usually know enough to be more optimistic about the food coming out of the kitchen then simple devotion to the Truth would allow.
There is an obvious performance aspect to all this. Professional actors front so well that they seem to become their characters. Who knew that actress Alexis Bledel hated coffee? Her character dutifully carried a paper cup of the stuff with her everywhere in the hundred and fifty caffeinated episodes of The Gilmore Girls. The rest of us are simply amateurs, and often uncomfortable with the gap between our assigned roles and the authentic person we claim to be.
There is some evidence that airline attendants carry around more fatigue than most of us, partly because fronting for air-carriers today means remaining upbeat in the face of the countless real and perceived affronts to passenger dignity. Look carefully, and you can almost see them straining to keep their frustrations out of view. It can be very stressful to serve the interests of an organization if we believe it betrays a core value.
The most difficult kind of fronting is when an individual is induced to deliver as their own what is essentially another’s message. It’s the burden of allowing oneself to seem to be the active agent in an exchange. Thus spouses and partners will sometimes ask the other to represent themselves as a committed believer to a point of view, when no commitment exists. One instructs the other about what to say, as in “When you call the Fredericks back, be sure to remind them that we are opposed to attending any event that. . . [Insert the offending feature here]” Whatever principle is at stake, it is the protesting partner who has passed along the task of an impassioned reply that the other may not share. Couples provide this stress-inducing service to each other all the time.
There is an interesting final irony about fronting. My impression is that its burdens are eased if a person is wearing a uniform. The official garb of an organization implicitly says to all clients and customers, “I am performing my assigned role. I have clothed myself in the firm’s attitudes, but know that underneath I am still my own person.” A policeman has sartorial support to claim that the ticket he is giving you is simply an application of the law. Besides, who would quarrel with anyone with both a gun and a club?
Obama comforting a Hurricane Sandy Victim Source: White House Photographer: Pete Souza
Almost all of the energy in our public rhetoric is reserved for unmasking what appears to many as the unjustified and self-serving optimism of political elites.
Anyone listening to any past president surely noticed that their public rhetoric was in a distinctly different key. Assuming that Donald Trump is a one-off anomaly, presidents speak in major chords that emphasize positivity, success, praise, enduring values, and always a degree of hope. It’s the nature of the office to be affirming. But such rhetoric is increasingly at odds with the sour and minor keys that tend to dominate the ‘rough music’ that comes with significant national and political events. It can hardly be news that irony and suspicion rule our airwaves, talk shows, blogs, news sites, and twitter feeds.
It’s clear to anyone who is listening that we live in an era dominated by oppositional rhetoric. The cultural voices that command the greatest attention are mostly reactive, negative and frequently vitriolic. Almost of this energy goes into unmasking what appears to so many as the unjustified and self-serving optimism of political and corporate elites. Increasingly, the negativity of the internet troll looks less like an isolated aberration than a new and durable rhetorical norm. As a younger student of political communication in the 1970s, I don’t recall seeing the plethora of books asserting presidential conspiracies than can now be found among the “new releases” on the shelves of our public libraries. And there is, of course, the current President’s daily vitriol. It’s hardly news that he excels at making nasty comments.
How did we get here? A bit of this effect is a matter of perception. The Democratic strategist Tony Schwartz noted years ago that in a simple election between two people there are actually four voting choices; a person can vote for or against either candidate. Schwartz noted that it was sometimes easier to help people discover who they were against. That insight was enough for him to produce devastating anti-Goldwater ads in the 1964 presidential contest.
In addition, the democratization of news gathering—or at least news commentary—means we hear less from official voices and more from dissenters. Presidents can no longer easily command broadcasters to turn over prime time for an important speech. The media competition for attention is too great. At the same time, more of our informational sources have merged straight reporting of public events with the entertainment imperative of centering a program on a host who can issue slicing rebukes. We expect our news with the twist of irony that comes easily in The Daily Show, Real Time with Bill Maher, or online outlets like Slate or Salon.com. As for talk radio: outside of NPR, no one seems to want to sound like a good-government wonk from Minnesota. A surer route to success is to become the audio equivalent of a professional wrestler tossing unworthy adversaries over the ropes.
In actual fact, as psychologist Stephen Pinker has noted in The Better Angels of Our Nature (Penguin, 2012), we are a somewhat more compassionate society than the one our ancestors knew. But it also seems apparent that we have less interest in advocates motivated to find common ground in civil discourse. This splintering of the culture is thus partly the effect of more decentralized and polarized news media, but it’s also caused by a cultural turn away from the communitarian trope that was proudly uttered in defense of significant advances in social welfare legislation following World War II. The G.I. Bill, Social Security, and the civil rights acts of the mid-1960s were milestones as enactments of this value, which could be summarized as broad support to use the political resources of the nation for the benefit of all. In this common pre-Reagan belief, government was the solution, not the problem.
The challenge posed by the newer turn toward a more atomized and suspicious culture is whether we and other western democracies can maintain a sense of shared national destiny. With a fragmented nation now served by fragmented media, finding what unites us is more difficult. That search is compounded by the fact that we no longer pay much attention to Presidents, even when they yearned to be the poets of our national spirit.
