American Verdict: Media and Spectacle

The crawl on all the cable news channels yesterday struck me as strange. The same headline appeared twice: once under the "Top Stories" banner, presumably the more important events of the day; and again under the "Entertainment" heading, along with this week's top-grossing movies. Herman Cain's troubles, rumblings about possible military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, and census data reporting 49 million Americans now living in poverty were relegated to the electron-bombarded back pages.

For 30 minutes prior to the reading of the verdict, the networks cut away from other stories (CNN left a reporter in Afghanistan in mid-sentence to announce the "breaking news"), gathered legal experts and entertainment "reporters," and speculated  as to what the verdict might be. The crowd of thousands outside the courthouse pumped signs that included "Murray Burn in Hell." When the verdict was actually announced, a roar worthy of the Colosseum rose, punctuated by a cacophony of car horns. Ambulances arrived to assist stricken swooners in the crowd. And it continued, on into the night.

But this is not the usual screed about the banality of Big Media or even the old battle over who is biased and who is a counterbalance. We have been gawkers at the freak show for millennia.

Before Hypermedia, we had village gossip, attendance at public punishments, popular salacious scandal, and all manner of vicarious mob mentalities. We sold tidbits and trinkets, brought the kids, hissed the villains, and mourned the righteous. The progression arcs all the way through the famous spectacles we recall from our own cultural history: John Wilkes Booth, Oscar Wilde, Bruno Hauptmann, Fatty Arbuckle, OJ, Casey Anthony, ad infinitum. Although each is different in detail, they share three things: spectacle, celebrity, and our vicarious interest. The differences in media are ones of scale and speed: from word of mouth around the village hearth, to the speed of light around a global one.

We are all, of course, still tribal. That evidence, in politics, conflict, ethnicity, and sect, is irrefutable. Small wonder that we are drawn to community events, for humans seek to belong. The magnetism of spectacle is the sheer ecstatic grandeur of it. The neolithic priests at Stonehenge used resonant sound within that enclosure to induce rapt, trance-like states in the congregants. Spectacle is our collective cultural High Mass, our secular ritual.

We are now and ever have been consumers of spectacle through media. The question of whether media drives our appetites or vice-versa was answered presciently by McLuhan: when we use a tool, the tool uses us. Ever since our antecedent picked up a stick and used it as an implement, our tools have been acting on us, extending and refining our grasp, enlarging our environments. The tools we use today are brain-tools, and they act upon our brains in turn, changing how we think.

Is this a good or a bad thing? The responsibility for that outcome, lies, of course, with us. Are we passive consumers, responding to spectacle in a media-soaked trance? Are we casually dismissive of these mass events? Or do we critically examine them, noting what they have to say about who we are?

Deconstruct spectacles, and they become lenses, magnifiers of what is in us.