Philosophical Reflections on the Age of Ephemera
29
As Postman asks—with, perhaps, a palpable sense of alarm: “What kind of
audience was this?”11
It was, to be sure, not just an audience proficient in the use of the
alphabet. The kind of written language that the audience was steeped in was not
the text message or the tweet—not ephemera—but rather the prose exposition,
the book-length treatise. And if some in the audience had never read a booklength treatise—it was nineteenth-century Peoria, after all—they were at least
steeped in a culture that modeled intellectual discourse on the book-length
treatise, and so their expectation was that the debate would proceed along these
lines. What is the drama of the book-length exposition? What pleasure would
the audience take in this sort of activity—for surely the good people of Peoria
did not attend this affair entirely out of a sense of civic obligation? In politics
there is the drama of winners and losers, of course, but more importantly, in all
aspects of life, the book-length exposition provides the drama of the slow
unveiling, the inexorable progress, step by step, toward revealing what must be
so, given all that has come before.
The drama of a visual medium is quite different. If it is a still medium,
like photography, we sometimes say that it “tells a thousand words,” but there is
no reason to think the words are true. A photograph frames a subject, arranging
its parts artfully within the frame and suggesting what lies outside the frame. A
picture of several protesters holding signs suggests, without showing, that there
are many more protesters beyond the frame—whether or not there are.
Moreover, pictures do not reveal slowly—there is an immediate emotional
reaction to a picture of a starving child, naked and bloated, which does not rely
on any history or context.12 Pictures, in fact, have trouble giving context—they
must be accompanied by text. Add to these constraints the motion of television
or movies or, these days, the YouTube video. Motion has its own logic and
requirements: it is not suitable for portraying still objects, not without the drama
of the slow pan, or the simulated motion of the quick cut. More suitable, more
natural to the medium, are images of movement or change: a bomb hitting a
target, a building on fire. The human face, as a canvas for emotions, is charged
when presented as a still image, but is even more charged when audibly
laughing or wailing. A complex issue requiring a great deal of textual
information is not only unwelcome on television, it is actually difficult to
convey.13 Words could be superimposed over images on the screen, but there is
not enough room on the screen—even now, with scrolling tickers at the bottom
and stock quotes running up the side of the wide screen HDTV—to provide
much more text than a simple headline or quick summary.
Perhaps Postman’s most troubling claim is that additional, unintended
information is carried by the medium of television and its visual drama. The
rapid-fire juxtaposition of visually stimulating images—fires, explosions, floods,
armies on the move—presented without history or context, and anchored, as it
were, only by the presence of a well-dressed spokesperson, transmits the
message that the world is effectively incomprehensible and chaotic—essentially