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No Sports, No Problem

Rhetorical Mastery, , , , , , ,

If there is a deep structure to television and other media platforms, it’s the long reach of the story form. It’s the foundational structure for almost everything we know.

It is obvious to everyone that the pandemic has sidelined almost all sport activity that would have been eagerly reported in our news and video media. Americans others around the world have a thirst for constant coverage.  In addition, competitive events are a major driver of revenue for professional leagues, as well as broadcast and cable television outlets. When the chances that teams would meet normally began to vanish, the sense of doom was apparent for the thousands of players, merchandisers, leagues and sports journalists.  And, of course, there are millions of fans everywhere who are mourning over the possible loss of whole seasons.

But the assumption of disaster is not completely justified. True, there is obviously far less play-by-play of everything from soccer to baseball.  Live (but not archival) coverage is mostly limited to golf or Korean baseball. But most sports reporting is not just about what is happening on the field.

Sports journalism is actually organized around narratives of competition, with a standard subset of reliable storylines: games from the record books to recall, players moving up or down, off-season trades made for strategic or financial reasons, narratives of personal triumph over hardship, reports of the wounded pride of those who have been benched, or news of clubhouse rivalries that have gone public.  And there can always be noisy discussions about which city, college or high school gets rightful bragging rights for its teams.  When all else fails, virtually any unbridled hubris from a sports superstar is good for a few thousand words or an hour of sports talk. These kinds of themes  are what continue to occupy news sites and mass media talkers, who would no more think of giving up their time slots than turning in their press passes.

Sports enthusiasts and lovers of romance novels share more than you might think.

I say all of this as someone who rarely pays attention to sports coverage.  But its so ubiquitous it is hard to miss.  Among others, The New York Times has hardly noticed that no one is playing anything. And then there is the recent biography of Robert Iger (The Ride of a Lifetime, 2019), former CEO of Disney-ABC.  He reminds his readers that the greatest sports producer in television history structured every event around the idea of an unfolding tale of triumph against long odds. Roone Arledge at ABC set the mold for television with Wide World of Sports, where a younger Iger worked as a lieutenant.  There would be no relying on just the action of the athletes to report.  There was always more drama in a Jamaican bobsled team, the humble backstory of a figure skater, or fog that has shut down an olympic event. Later in his career Arledge would easily move into new realms, like a spectacular Frank Sinatra special in Madison Square Garden, or managing ABC’s growing News Division.

The real point is that sport is but one narrow category of narrative, and narrative always outlasts its subjects. Sports enthusiasts and lovers of other narrative forms–romance novels, for example–share more than you might think. The standard tropes remain key to understanding both.  Villains are to be identified, their victims pitied, and heroes need to show up to save the day. There are usually fools as well, but it’s usually enough that the just are. Throughout a story, character remains dominant and defines what will happen at a certain plot point.  And, of course, these roles can change.  New events always pose a risk to a hero’s stature.  And villains are made to be reformed.

So if there is a ‘deep structure’ to sports portrayed on television or elsewhere, it is surely the durability of the story form. It’s the structure of almost everything we know. Those old afternoon “soaps” on ABC and it’s Monday Night Football have more in common than we might think.

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It Was Supposed to be Just a Thought Experiment

Problem Practices, , , , , , ,

Does a life continue to hold meaning if it has to be sustained remotely, with devices that only deliver small fragments of ourselves to others?

A seminar I regularly teach in the Philosophy of Communication started at the end of January in a room that comfortably held it’s 16 members, most nearing graduation.  The course considers a range of eclectic thinkers, many focused on how high expectations for communicating with others runs afoul of unseen obstacles.1  A key premise in the course is that we overestimate what we think we can achieve when we address others. A continuous thread develops on what the effects of “disembodied” communication has done to us as a species.  For most human history life happened in small groups and communities.  Communication was in real time and close spaces.  It was the early Victorians who began to see the wonders of “communication at a distance,” triggered first by the telegraph, and later with electronic refinements that made phones, radio and all of our modern paraphanalia possible.  Charles Cooley, one of the founding figures in the discipline of sociology, took delight in the possibilities of the idea of mass communication.  Others like Henry David Thoreau were not so sure. Thoreau famously pushed for the kind of life that would be fully grounded in the world outside one’s own door. “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas,” he noted, but folks in distant places may “have nothing important to communicate. . .”

Tracing the rise of the tools that make it possible to send verbal artifacts of ourselves to others is a long narrative, especially in terms of the now accepted view that our heads are often far removed from wherever our bodies may be situated.  Demands on our attention can come from anywhere.

Did we lose too much to lose the human birthright of proximity?

One of theorists we considered was Joshua Meyrowitz, who noted that electronic media “destroy the specialness of time and place.”  Building on his concerns are other media theorists, he explores what  happens to the essential communication model of conversation when it is understood to not be direct or synchronous.  Most online platforms we use deliver content in this form. The seminar raised arguments and counterarguments about the effects of living out-of-sync with only verbal or visual fragments.

One day in March we discovered the that the essays we discussed had prepared us for more than these thought experiments.  The seminar became a distance-learning exercise created by the pandemic.  We were in our own spaces and trying to stay in touch to continue to talk about the virtues of being in the same space.

My students, who are far more savvy in using social media, suddenly faced a fully digital future where the world was to be experienced mostly from the old bedrooms they thought they had left for good when they moved to campus. And I suddenly felt like a performer without an audience. Can a seminar based on discussion of common readings really work online? Does it mean as much to connect only with words?

To be sure, campuses have the tools and platforms to deliver a lot of material to students.  But is the residential experience easily expendable?  Did we lose too much to lose the human birthright of proximity?

Most Americans who recently had outside commitments to jobs, organizations or schools are now asking a different form of the same question. Does my work flourish in close contact with others? Is the phone or a Zoom link enough? And most importantly, does a life hold meaning if it has to be sustained by others remotely?

Lately, some of my students have reported how much they miss portions of their prior circumstances based on a lot of face-to-face interaction.  I suppose that view confirmed my own bias as well.  It also made us pause to consider what we’d lost.

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1The course included a number of readings by Sherry Turkle, Kenneth Gergen and others, and three books: John Peters’ Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, Joshua Meyrowitz’s No Sense of Place:  The Impact of Media on Social Behavior, and Gary Woodward, The Perfect Response, Studies of the Rhetorical Personality.