The unintended audience is the new norm. And with it, we have burdened ourselves with the worry ofnot knowing where our communications might surface.
Nothing represents the challenges of connecting with others better than the ease with which a person can use newer media to eavesdrop on messages not intended for them. The digital revolution has led to popular media platforms favoring content that started as private communications. Some of this visual and textual material is used as digital clickbait, feeding our appetites for the kinds of gossip that used to exist mostly in supermarket tabloids. Some intrudes more awkwardly, as when a forwarded e-mail goes to more eyes than it was supposed to.
In simpler times it was possible but awkward to listen to someone’s conversations through a wall or a shared party line. Broadly speaking, our secrets were more easily kept. Physical spaces usually created privacy. And we didn’t have access to tiny recording technologies such as smartphones, or permeable channels of communication such as social media. Privacy was an attribute an individual could choose. It made life easier. It was not something we planned to give up as citizens swept up into the digital world. After all, if we wanted a peek into the private lives of others, we had theater and then film. Even in Shakespeare’s day audiences could spend hours witnessing the sordid backstories of Europe’s kings and queens.
The absence of the fourth wall is key to drama’s attraction. But what was once mostly limited to the theater is now a feature of everyday life, as cameras and mics invade most spaces. Few television police procedurals or legal narratives would be complete without the exposure of private communications that somehow contradicts claims of innocence. They reflect the fact that real life investigative bureaucracies regularly seek permission to eavesdrop, using off the shelf technologies that now make digital searches relatively easy.
The right to access personal data is at the core of the current legal battle that pits Apple against the federal government. The FBI wants to hack data from the cellphones of criminal suspects, like those who murdered innocent citizens in San Bernardino last year.
In recent decades we have added to the expectation that there is entertainment value in witnessing events not originally intended for public view. Most reality television shows gain attention by using the camera to capture moments of private humiliation or subterfuge. Think of the hapless business people who open their professional lives to public view in exchange for help and cash from reality “stars” like chef Gordon Ramsey or hotel consultant Anthony Melchiorri. Add in a range of other factors, including the natural habit of the young to be careless in their monitoring of their digital posts, and it’s easy to see how a multitude of messages can quickly verge out of their lanes. Remember the turning point in the 2012 presidential election? A private fundraising event hosted by Mitt Romney was secretly recorded by a hotel employee. In his spiel to potential contributors Romney wrote off much of the nation as lazy and unreachable, writing off his electoral chances at the same time.
Privacy was an attribute an individual could choose. It made life easier. It was not something we planned to give up as citizens swept up into the digital world.
It is now the rare individual who has managed to hold on to the presumptive right touted in many European countries to not be observed.
All of this is a reminder that as rhetorical creatures we are less able to select our own audiences. There is no longer a clear connection between who we wish to address and who actually receives our messages. An assumption that others can eavesdrop into personal and professional communications complicates what used to be a source’s prerogative to clearly target receivers without unwanted blowback from outsiders.
So the unintended audience is the new norm. And with it we have burdened ourselves with the additional worry of not knowing where our communications might surface.
Video Installation, Tim White-Sobieski Wikipedia.org
Our fascination with video in all forms his has resulted in the loss of many of the nation’s newspapers, the decline of the network documentary, the near-disappearance of the magazine of ideas, and a younger generation for whom extended time with the printed page is an ordeal.
Over sixty years ago an American philosopher described with unusual clarity the very different communication functions of visual media. Susanne Langer was interested in art and social rituals, exploring how we process pictorial information. Philosophy in a New Key (Mentor Books, 1942) still resonates as a way to understand the importance of our mid-Twentieth Century cultural turn towards images, represented primarily by television, but also all of the other digital platforms that build on the “visual interfaces” that increased the spread of digital media. Langer was writing in the 1940s and could not have anticipated how video and computer technology evolved. But her insights were taken up by the Media Ecology Movement over the years, helping to clarify a set of effects that every American needs to understand.
Susanne Langer
Here’s the key insight that has evolved from her initial work. While video and television were once celebrated as new ways to pass on information, the better assessment is that these forms actually undermine the quest for ideas. Think of ideas as the non-material but potent bases for understanding the world around us. Ideas order our thinking and give form to our values. So there is irony that the flowering of theoretical breakthroughs in psychology, sociology and other fields in the first part of the Twentieth Century the seeds of non-print media would be sown to make them seem less urgent.
Consider the growth of critical and analytical insights that came mid-century from thinkers such as Walter Lippmann (modern democracies), George Herbert Mead (the construction of the self), Kenneth Burke (how language has its way with us) and David Riesman (the nature of the American character), to name just a few. All offered works about how we consciously construct ourselves and understand the external world: elaborately laid out accounts of what Langer called “discursive understandings” which can best be understood be understood on the page.
What changed? The culture of ideas would be undermined by rapidly expanding access to the presentational form of television, which feeds the already strong human impulse to feel rather than think abstractly. In plain words, visual media tied to commercial goals are usually death to print-based explorations of ideas. In plain language, visual media tied to commercial goals are usually death to the exploration of ideas.
If this sounds like aimless armchair theorizing, it isn’t. Langer’s original insight has helped us understand that television is representational rather than conceptual. It needs to show something, and nothing is more meaningful than the human face: the primary register of emotion.
As later writers noted, we don’t watch video content for the richness of its explanatory power. In fact, a printed transcript of a supposed informational program usually looks pretty sparse in print. The quintessential moment of television is actually the close-up. Any television director learning their craft will know that the face is the informational content of television. Human features are expressive. We are hardwired to read them and absorb all the cues they give us. While a theater actor needs to project his character with his full body. A television actor knows the key to success is mostly in how he uses expressiveness centered on the eyes. In spite of what we might think, we don’t watch even a “brainy” television program like Jeopardy because “we can learn a lot.” Mostly what draws us in is the human drama of trying to find the right answer. We like to ride the roller coaster of relief or regret along with the contestant who will perform them.
So what’s the cost in living in a video-saturated world? It’s ultimately that television is generally a distraction from what we have designed a liberal education and our great academic institutions to do: to encourage exploration of ideas that illuminate the human condition. Lord knows someone like television interviewer Charlie Rose tries. So do the interviewers of book authors who regularly appear on C-SPAN. But most of us are otherwise engaged, watching sketch comedies and police procedurals featuring people in desperate straits. The gut reaction in tight close-up will always trump a “talking head.” Vital concepts like economic fairness and social justice may be important, but they have the disadvantage of no precise material form.
Ask a television director to produce a program of ideas, and they will despair. There’s only so much B-roll footage you can show to enliven a visual presentation on American criminal justice practices, the widening gap between rich and poor, or how the sale of derivatives contributed to the financial collapse in 2008. Within commercial media the preference is almost always to underwrite programs of presentational content filled with images of humans in the process of coping. These are the kinds of “expressive moments” a CBS News executive once noted should be the bases of most of his network’s stories.
Because longer discussions of policy and ideas can’t compete, our fascination with video in all forms his contributed to the loss of many of the nation’s newspapers, the decline of the network documentary, the near-disappearance of magazines of ideas, and a younger generation for whom extended time with the printed page is an ordeal.
In American culture there is an entire turn away from accepting and exploring challenging issues of human and social complexity. Not only are presidential campaigns beginning to resemble reality shows, with their heightened moments of rage and put-downs, but we now expect that any expert called upon to comment on a breaking story should be able to explain themselves in seconds rather than minutes.
We are indeed paying a high price in our wholesale flight from the realm of discursive media. If conceptual thinking is an ability that makes us smarter, we have reasons to be concerned that our fascination with screens is doing the reverse.
