Tag Archives: news

Disaster a la Carte

Problem Practices, , , , , ,

video play image wikipediaHave we become numb to the irony of using the good news of advertising to sell peeks into the Seventh Circle of Hell?

Understanding events by giving attention to context is our intellectual birthright.  It isn’t just poets who widen the frame to see life and all of its interconnected possibilities. Even a new automobile driver must learn to read the totality of the landscape in order to stay ahead of potential problems. Those whose business it is to document trends in the culture provide the clearest examples of pulling back to see beyond the small pieces to the larger whole. This skill was especially evident in the work of ground-breaking critics of film and painting like Pauline Kael and Robert Hughes.  And it remains on continual display in the works of any number of contemporary novelists and essayists.

Even so, I’m struck with how digital news from many different sources slices and dices single occurrences into tighter frames of reference that have the effect of training us to ignore a wider view.  Because so much internet journalism is short-form rather than long-form, we are encouraged to look at events that hook us by their recency rather than their significance. Many news sites update every few minutes to catch the latest atrocities and verbal assaults that have surfaced. Our media atomizes these moments, even though moving from one event to the next in a flash sabotages the mind’s capacity to glean significant and larger patterns.  Our growing thirst for the recent is the equivalent of looking at a pointillist painting just inches from the canvas.

Here’s one specific form of the problem: the mindless juxtaposition of upbeat advertising immediately in front of videos of human beings abusing each other. This is a good test of what we can call the consciousness of incongruous juxtaposition. Imagine an elevator ride that includes successive visits to floors where the doors open onto scenes of people who are in dire need of help.  Presumably we would feel compelled to respond because we are momentarily “in” each place as well as the elevator.  But such a ride should be psychologically uncomfortable, forcing us to witness successive traumas partly beyond the bubble of our own world.

ISIS searchThe point is that our media tends to destabilize the relationship we have to the  outside world.  And more than a few media critics have noted that the constancy of this fact seems to dull our abilities to react appropriately to the incongruous.

Like or not, we now live in an age where we must decide how much we want to open ourselves to various forms of human depravity.

Consider a few samples that our consciousness of incongruous juxtiposition, all presented in the last few years in the popular Huffington Post:

-A house explosion that critically injures two in New Jersey is caught by a dash cam a half a block away, preceded by a 15-second ad for Boeing Aerospace.

-A closed circuit camera catches a fiery blast at a Russian railway station that kills 16 people, brought to us courtesy of Starburst Candy.

-A video of gruesome ISIS killings of a number of men in Libya, also preceded by an ad for Starburst Candy.

-A video of a man attacking a British police officer with a foot long kitchen knife, preceded by an ad for Airnb, with a child in a posh living-room taking her first steps.

You get the idea.  In each case the ads book-ended the stories.  Images of mayhem are utterly at odds with the upbeat messages for a range of products and services, all following in quick succession.

Why don’t we notice?  Irony is more than a nice literary trope.  It’s one product of a mind that is fully alive to the tensions that exist in any culture.  Even so, desensitization is perhaps the price we pay for franchising our time to others using “clickbait” to draw us in.

In truth, news in print and on tape has almost always been supported by advertising that is immediately adjacent to content. But most outlets used to edit stories in ways to buffer ad messages from horrific content. Even minimal sensibility for what advertisers used to call “complementary editorial” has disappeared on some sites, suggesting declining sensibilities that would normally recoil at awkward juxtapositions.  It’s testimony to our growing numbness that we usually miss the ironies of using the good news of advertising to sell peeks into the Seventh Circle of Hell. Imperial Rome may have had plenty of bread and apparently a lot of grisly “circuses.” But they’ve got nothing on us.

Comment at Woodward@tcnj.edu

cropped-Perfect-Response-logo.jpg

Looking for Multiple Narratives

Models, Problem Practices, Rhetorical Mastery, , , , , , , , ,

 

Wikimedia.org
    Five Witnesses Will Usually Have           Divergent Accounts of the Same Event                          Wikimedia.org

 

We should be impatient if the reporting from a given medium asks us to settle for just one “story.” The better option is to expect that there are at least several.

As people in my line of work are fond of saying, ‘language sometimes does our thinking for us.’  Word choices are tracks that inevitably point us in specific directions.   So when we talk about “media”—because it is a plural term—we are primed  to acknowledge significant differences between individual outlets.  That’s as it should be, and a way of thinking we need remember when we are acting on the basis of any single version of events.

For most of us, the concept of a “story” could not be clearer, setting up an expectation that we will take in a running version of events that can stand on its own. This is all well and good if we are talking about one individual’s experiences.  We are all entitled to our stories. They function to make life understandable and meaningful. They are also useful barometers of our own mental states.

Narrative fiction and films have our attention because they fulfill what we seem hardwired to need: figures to empathize with, and the continuity and simplicity of a single of perspective. This is the rhetorical form of the synecdoche: when one example stands in for a whole class of people or events.

The mistake is when we accept the adequacy of  singular form as a tool for understanding the real world. The cable-news anchorperson asks a reporter in the field, “What’s the story?” A headline launches a short version of events usually defined by its internal coherence.  An editor or producer presses a reporter to find a single experience that encapsulates a larger trend. As news consumers we are attracted to narrative continuity over reports that ask us to consider “competing realities.”  Complexity tends to get written out of accounts that need to be boiled down to one and half minutes of air time or 600 words of reporting.

But in actual fact, human events usually contain multiple and contradictory stories: accounts that  are often diverse in their details and frequently inconsistent with each other. We easily recognize this when we compare notes with family or friends about key events that we’ve shared about some earlier experiences of our ancestors. We expect to add details another missed, or to add alternative interpretations of a participant’s motives, or  to pass on an observation that is completely new to others. In those settings we are not surprised to learn that one version of events is not enough.  Eventually all the pieces put together form a kind of intersubjective truth that works at least for those who participated.

The same is true in the current news environment. The ongoing conflict between the state of Israel and Palestinians living on its borders does not permit the luxury of one narrative, but many. The controversial implementation of the Affordable Care Act cannot be contained in one  personal experience.  We know there must have many, reflecting the range of responses by individuals and the states where they reside.  Even when we think we have some clarity on the “aggression” of the Russian Federation in reclaiming Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, we can easily be surprised by long-form accounts from the region that can force us out of what seems  like a settled narrative.

We are smarter if we expect that news reports and other kinds of nonfiction accounts should come to us in uneven waves. In terms of conventional communication analysis, we usually look for a “preferred narrative:” the kind of account that comes from official sources and takes hold of the popular imagination.  But we also expect to find that there are “alternate” or “counter-narratives” as well, and often a series of them. These may come from the less powerful or the marginalized who were caught up in the same event.  It’s not unusual that years later they emerge as the new preferred narratives.

Charles Dickens started a novel with the famous lines, “It was the best of times.  It was the worst of times.”  The thought reflects his savvy as a narrator of the human condition.  We need to expect that there may be a plurality of perspectives that will undermine the coherence and psychological comfort that comes with a single account. “Reality” is often best represented in a Venn diagram of overlapping accounts. We need to remind ourselves to be impatient if reporting about human events seeks an unearned consensus by insisting on a single truth.

Comment at woodward@tcnj.edu