Cultural Cognition and High-Definition Politics
posted by Dave Hoffman
Last week, in reaction to the President’s latest speech on Iraq, Andrew Sullivan and Kevin Drum highlighted an unexpected consequence of the rise of high-definition television. As Drum puts it:
Just as Richard Nixon “lost” the 1960 debate because, although he sounded fine on radio, he looked bad on TV, so modern politicians are going to have to learn to look good even when they’re looming over their audience on 80-inch HD plasma screens. Looking good on a scratchy 32-inch tube doesn’t cut it anymore. I predict booming business for a whole new generation of media advisers and skin care consultants.
Approving nods from the blognoscenti followed. Gosh, even guys from the Corner agreed with Sullivan and Drum. Too bad the claim is trivial.
The argument is that like the advent of T.V. itself, high definition television will force politicians to respond to a new set of (superficial) demands; to spend more time primping, and thus (I guess) reduce the likelihood that the candidate of “ideas” will win.
As a historical matter, recent scholarship tends to support what was once thought of as a myth: Nixon lost the 1960 debate and (possibly) the election because he looked tired, hirsute, sweaty and orange in the first ‘60 Presidential debate. Fair enough: television was indeed a paradigm shift that politicians were not ready for, and Nixon was uniquely vulnerable because he was (until the debate) a huge overdog. But although Nixon won among radio listeners – giving rise to the paradigm shift claim – he likely had a big built-in advantage in that medium: a voice congenial for radio listening. That is, there is no such thing as a neutral medium.
I’ve learned this first-hand as a part of some research designed to test survey respondents’ reactions to a video stream: even on the Internet, subjects with narrow pipe see a very different video than those with broadband, making it difficult to collect a truly apples-to-apples sample. The thing that Drum, Sullivan, and others seem to forget is that we’re simply switching one set of distortions for another. Politicians have responded to low definition t.v. with a set of tools: makeup, hair stylists, careful tailors. They will likely respond to clearer t.v. with moves that, at least on one reading, are more substantively related to well-being: working out more, eating better foods, and coming out as hair-challenged.
But even were this new advance in the medium of political communication to be 100% immersive – if we had hyper-realistic media transmission systems that let you smell Fred Thompson’s Gucci loafers – the way that we experience politicians, news, indeed, any informational stimulus would still be biased and culturally contingent. That bias isn’t external to the viewer, it is all in our heads.
September 18, 2007 at 12:48 am
Posted in: Behavioral Law and Economics
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