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.
Are we a nation that is still addressable as a society that coheres?
Since the early democracies in Sicily a person or group with specific persuasive goals has been said to be locked in to the requirement to formulate messages that build on community attitudes. This idea is a central canon in communication studies. For most scholars in the field, the study of public persuasion would be unmanageable without this convenient notion. We understand an audience to be the generative source of successful persuasion attempts. It’s from their views that a persuader fashions ways to connect with them.
Yet this basic assumption is increasingly problematic. We still lean heavily on the belief that we can lump individuals together in cohesive groups with demographic and lifestyle similarities (age, sex, income, region of residence, and so on). Traditional media outlets such as television networks often “sell” their audiences to advertisers based on some of these features. And virtually every music, film and television producer is convinced they know their “market.” Even so, the concept of the audience rarely works as well in fact as it does in theory. In their study of The Mass Audience, James Webster and Patricia Phalen remind us that “audiences are not naturally occurring ‘facts,’ but social creations. In that sense, they are what we make them” (p. xiii).
There are two problems with this core idea the audience. One is that with the proliferation of “new” media choices contained in the Internet as a gateway supporting many “platforms.” In this environment audiences turn out to be neither uniform nor very predictable. Even the motives of those who self-select themselves into the same group can be surprisingly diverse. For example, it would be risky to infer much about the audience for content on Snapchat or any of the thousands of sites that stream video and audio content for free. Even analysts at The Nielsen Company—the nation’s most visible audience research firm—would concede that it’s extremely difficult to come up with reliable metrics especially for “one-off” events.
The second problem is even more daunting. The structural changes in our newly dominant media make individual usage far more scattered and fragmented. Aristotle wrote one of the first studies of human communication (The Rhetoric, circa 335 BC) with an eye on the challenges of addressing a few hundred citizens within a small city. Today, by contrast, audiences are sometimes defined in the millions, with messages delivered to them on a host of platforms that increasingly muddle the question of what makes a message “public” or “private.” We may still assume that most men do not read Cosmopolitan or Vogue. But beyond recording “hits” to a site, even popular message aggregators like the Daily Beast or similar news sites cannot be easily defined by their audiences. The impact of their customizable messaging is difficult to access.
Consider just two snapshots of current media use:
Digital devices of various sorts get about ten times more attention than newspapers and magazines. Most of these devices are accessing the web, where the average time spent on a single page is under a minute.
Among American teens who will shape future discourse, texting has become a time-consuming preoccupation, with an average of 60 separate messages a day, and 6-hours at social media sites over the same 24 hours.
Usage patterns like these hint at the paradoxes about the nature of modern discourse. Does our dependence on digital devices borne from imagistic platforms (graphical interfaces loaded into virtually all digital devices) disallow the kind of thinking about uniform attitudes that is thought to be needed for message development? Put another way, if modern life now proceeds as continuous exposure to a series of visual riffs in broad-based and space-restricted media such as U-tube or Google Plus+, is there any chance to create a series of appeals that speak to the needs of their heterogeneous users?
Is the fraying of our faith in a true national community one of the prices we will pay for the fragmentation of our media?
Beyond our love of shopping malls, mass market films and television, do we share anything like the common civic culture that was easier to see in the pre-digital age?
When Americans witnessed the first moon landing in 1969 there were just three national television networks that made up what some media historians have called “the national hearth.” Together they had a 93 share, representing about half of the nation’s total population.1 Are there still universal values and ideals that define our national life? In classical terms, is the collective polis still addressable as a common unit?
Some social theorists have noted that we are less a “melting pot” that blends away our differences than a culture that more or less accommodates them. If that is the case, the older idea of an audience sharing the same property of a common culture may be simply a fiction of media and communication disciplines. Should that turn out to be even partially true, we need to ask what a viable alternative model of communication that is not based on assessing audience-oriented appeals looks like. There is growing evidence that we already see the withering effects of undirected communication: for example, rhetorical bomb-throwing for its momentary thrills. “Trolling” in the “comments” section of news site is just one symptom.
All of these concerns may appear rather abstract. But they have real consequences. We traditionally assume that effective messages usually get their energy from appeals that trigger a sense of identification with a source and their message. We also assume that communication failure can often be attributed to messages that have “boomeranged,” meaning a piece of discourse has actually alienated those who received it. But, of course, you have to care about the effects of your words. So a fading tradition that assumes our words are chosen to match the needs of a given audience raises practical questions about whether enough Americans have the will to function in a society that coheres.
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193 percent of Americans watching television were tuned to this event. TV By the Numbers, July 17, 2009, http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2009/07/17/moonwalk-draws-125-million-viewers-cbs-and-cronkite-win-big/
