Total Transparency: Toward Integrity or Artifice?
posted by Frank Pasquale
In an extraordinary paper (and talk) on social networking, danah boyd brings up the following anecdote to explain how publicity can modify self-presentation:
In the early 1960s, Stokely Carmichael regularly addressed segregated black and white audiences about the values of Black Power. Depending on his audience, he used very different rhetorical styles. As his popularity grew, he began to attract media attention and was invited to speak on TV and radio. Unfortunately, this was more of a curse than a blessing because the audiences he would reach through these mediums included both black and white communities. With no way to reconcile the two different rhetorical styles, he had to choose. In choosing to maintain his roots in front of white listeners, Carmichael permanently alienated white society from the messages of Black Power.
Glenn Reynolds notes a similar dynamic on the campaign trail:
There’s this weird paradox, in that the more transparent you become, the less spontaneous you can be. For example, you had these stories of people like JFK and LBJ on a campaign airplane, shooting the bull off the record with reporters and saying all kinds of stuff that they would never say now. But there’s no such thing as off the record anymore.
I don’t have much analysis, but I think there’s one other dynamic that may come into play–the gradual acceptance by the public of gaffes and miscues as the pressures of perpetually being on stage become clear. The media has gorged on such “pseudo-events” for too long. Coverage of real policy differences, rather than slips of the tongue, would be refreshing.
June 30, 2007 at 2:55 pm
Posted in: Culture, Politics
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Responses (3)
Patrick S. O'Donnell - June 30, 2007 at 6:31 pm
“Coverage of real policy differences, rather than slips of the tongue, would be refreshing.” Agreed. And we might consider the prospects of this ever occurring in the light of the following: “the media have become a significant *anti-democratic* force in the United States and, to varying degrees, worldwide.” As Robert W. McChesney explains, “Behind the lustrous glow of new technologies and electronic jargon, the media system has become increasingly concentrated and conglomerated into a relative handful of corporate hands. This concentration accentuates the core tendencies of a profit-driven, advertising-supported media system: hypercommercialism and denigration of journalism and public service. It is a poison-pill for democracy.” Please see his book, Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times (New York: The New Press, 2000).
Frank - June 30, 2007 at 7:37 pm
Agree re McChesney–his work is very powerful. My upcoming co-authored piece on search engines relies in part on Rich Media, Poor Democracy. Yochai Benkler’s work may also be of interest to those concerned about media concentration.
The following chart gives a good sense of the degree of concentration and interlocking connections between mass media:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060703/mediachart
An American Berlusconi may well be slouching toward Washington.
Patrick S. O'Donnell - June 30, 2007 at 7:46 pm
Thanks Frank. Please tell us you have a bevy of research assistants who help you keep track of all this wonderful stuff!
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