Every theater is a museum of conversation. In its many forms and formats drama invites us to admire the diligence that goes into a transformative exchange.
In these pages we have frequently worried about how the primary model for human communication—the face to face conversation—seems to be weakening as a default form, taking on more mutations that diminish its essence of human contact in real space and time. We’ve cited the alarming research of Sherry Turkle (Reclaiming Conversation, 2015), with its surveys of younger Americans that reveal a distinct discomfort with direct interpersonal connection. And we’ve noted a decline in emotional affect: emotions seemingly flattened by no-obligations digital devices that absorb so much of our time.
For most of us the challenge of engaging others has never been that easy. In the presence of another we must also listen, a process we often fake more than fulfill. The means getting out of our own heads long enough to hear what another is saying. And then there’s the unpredictability of direct contact. Potential partners in conversation can surprise or even diminish us, as when a listener shows complete indifference to what we are saying. A bored interlocutor who has been entrusted with a precious and personal story can inflict real injury.
It’s a good thing we have theater and all of its variations: plays, films and television. Theater perfects conversation. In important ways it functions as a museum of the form, inviting us to admire the craft that goes into a transformative dialogue. Characters that aren’t rhetorical–aren’t very fluent or engaging–are seldom the magnets in a story. In popular theater, at least, we want snappy one-liners. We want responsiveness. We welcome a clash of wills between two equally formidable and loquacious people. Even a dystopian story offers useful lessons. We wonder why those in a dysfunctional world can’t find the resources of hope and empathy that should be their inheritance.
Anyone’s short list for inclusion in their own cinematic museum of interpersonal fluency will vary. The top of my list would include films such as John Madden’s Shakespeare in Love (1998), Richard Linklater’s wonderful trilogy of love and loss that concluded with Before Midnight (2013), and the old film and stage chestnut that has just reopened on Broadway, The Front Page (1931, 1974, 2016). In both serious and funny ways, all give us characters who are alive to the words and ideas of others.
Amplifying feelings and ideas requires reservoirs of energy, curiosity, and the will to draw others out.
Television is just as fertile in providing good examples. Old chestnuts like The West Wing (1999-2006) and Gilmore Girls (2000-2007) were mostly centered on interpersonal relationships that needed to be negotiated through compelling talk and argument. The actors in those series were quick to remind admirers that their scripts tended to run twice the length of other shows with the same time frame. Conversation takes effort and a degree of generosity. Amplifying feelings and ideas requires the will to connect and draw others out.
Listen to Celine and Jesse, Before Midnight’s couple with a young family and a boat load of unfilled aspirations: he, as a writer, and she as a mother who wants to escape back into the unpredictability of her adventurous youth. Their love is no longer new. Yet both are trying to find the safest tracks to a shared future.
Céline: So if we're going to spend another fifty-six more years together...
Jesse: Yeah?
Céline: What about me would you like to change?
Jesse: [Smirks] That's another one of your can't-win questions. I'm not answering that.
Céline: What do you mean? There's not one thing you'd like to change about me? I'm perfect?
Jesse: Okay.
Céline: Okay.
Jesse: Actually...
Céline: One thing.
Jesse: If I could change one thing about you...
Céline: Uh-huh.
Jesse: It would be for you to stop trying to change me.
Céline: You're a very skilled manipulator, you know that?
Jesse: Well, I'm onto you. I know how you work.
Céline: You think?
Jesse: Yeah. I know everything about you.
It’s clear they have a long way to go. But somehow we believe they have the conversational chops to navigate through the accommodations the will have to make for dreams that have been put on hold.
Of course conversation should not be relegated to a spectator form. If it is representative of our dramatic arts, it’s one that we need to cultivate in ourselves. Twitter, and two-word responses in Facebook won’t cut it as forms that will push the potentials of communication forward. As a teacher it can be painful to be on the frontlines with too many able students who seem to have been rendered mute by shifting too much time and energy to stunted forms of connectivity. The impulse to interact seems to have become dormant. What is lost is the expressive power that is our birthright as symbol-using creatures.
When enough bad information is spread around it licenses all kinds of fantasies that take on a life of their own.
Since the mid-1800s information traveling at nearly the speed of light has transformed the opportunities for Americans to know more about their world. Of course the printed text offered a much earlier gateway to the minds of others. But book culture still works on an extended clock, using time to develop more considered insights. In contrast, electronic culture in the information age tends to give us allegations and assertions on the fly. Now and then a few are actually true.
We are at a transition point when anyone can “publish” at will. Access to digital media seems to create infinitely permeable understandings of what “information” can be. We are no longer shocked that willful distortion and strategic disinformation is regularly in the mix of ‘views’ on offer. But it is dismaying to see even a president-elect abandoning the usual rhetorical circumspection that comes to leaders who are about to speak in behalf of a nation. Trump is a fantasist. Never has a new chief executive come to the office with less regard for the reality-based world. Politifact’s example of a tweet from Trump on November 15 is typical: “The @nytimes sent a letter to their subscribers apologizing for their BAD coverage of me.” Not true. Nor is there an evidence for the stunning claim that he “actually” won the 2016 popular vote, as he recently asserted.
Trump is a fantasist. Never has a new chief executive come to the office with less regard for the reality-based world.
Any historical period has included individuals engaged in malicious distortion. The Second World War’s Tokyo Rose was perhaps the most famous. But we seem to be at the threshold of an era where claims anchored in evidence have no special status. This new mutant version of the information age finds ready acceptance of “alternate narratives” that are wrong, but carry just enough veracity to be taken seriously.
There are disturbing signs of our weakening regard for the truth everywhere. A majority of Republicans still believe President Obama is not an American citizen. The evidence of his birth certificate and transformational presidency is not enough. And then we have the news that The Oxford English Dictionary has chosen “post truth” as its word of the year, reflecting—among other things—the low-knowledge/big-change results seen recently with Britain’s Bexit vote and the 2016 presidential election.
People who study these things estimate that one in three Twitter posts are generated by computers programmed to lob what are literally mindless attacks against others. The accuracy of those issued from real humans often aren’t much better. And we now read reports that Facebook and Twitter are scrambling to tighten controls on “false news” stories and mindless invective thrown at political opponents. They have been overrun in part by “disinformation specialists” both home and abroad that enter the fray of national debate under cover of anonymity. These hacks are able to repeat dubious accusations that would never see the light of day in a fact-checked magazine or newspaper.
The willingness to believe falsehoods even overtakes scientific evidence and academic expertise. These days academic analysis is not so much admired as dismissed or ridiculed. Many Americans have redefined universities as political organizations, perpetuating what they see as a runaway political correctness that substitutes for reasoned understanding. I’ve had columns and posts about communication processes trolled by readers less for what I said and more for who I am. For some it is enough to know that a person is an academician to make the label self-indicting.
When enough bad information is spread around it licenses all kinds of fantasies that take on their own life. So when a street in Miami Beach floods, some residents can still find reasons to blame the local water department for leaky pipes rather than accept the inconvenient truth of melting ice caps triggering “king tides.” Of course most of us eventually face consequences for not living in the reality-based world. As almost any smoker can tell you, truths have a way of imposing themselves on our pitiful efforts to look away from the obvious.
Beyond simple untruths, when proposed policies offend important values—justice, fairness and compassion, to cite just a few–there is too much time for the mischief of disinformation and misinformation to have their ways with us before reason can add to real understandings. As Winston Churchill famously remarked, “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”
I was never much of a believer in teaching “media literacy” courses to students at all levels. But the subject may indeed be needed to save us from the quicksand of fantasies scattered across the internet, and soon to be given the imprimatur of presidential authority.
