I
watched President Obama and his town hall meeting tonight, with Anderson
Cooper, and their discussion and debate with the audience about gun violence
and Obama’s modest proposals on gun control. What struck me was perhaps
something odd, but the more I thought about it, perhaps something important
about modern political discourse: Obama’s speech was slow and deliberate and
thoughtful, while Cooper’s speech was quick and pointed and glib.
I
thought about Obama’s slow speaking as a way of talking in a seminar, when you
have two or three hours to understand a point, whereas Cooper’s speech was on a
timer, a fuse lit with seconds to go, zeroing in on a quick point,
entertaining yet superficial. As a somewhat slow talker myself, I could listen
to Obama, and I gave him the patience to make his point, and I agreed with much
of what he said. I wondered if Cooper—representing the media and in a way how
we communicate in our media culture—was more modern than Obama, but also at the
root of why we in this country are less of a ‘we’ as years go by, why we talk
past each other in political discourse, why we characterize opponents in
stereotypes (or other facile categorizations) and caricatures. Has ‘media insta-responding,’
to coin a term, corrupted our ability to think carefully, to weigh, to
consider, and even to empathize? When we know of a world that only
‘insta-responds,’ do we start basing our decisions on prejudices, stereotypes,
and easily understood theories without tests in gritty practice?
Insta-responding
is part of our world in a way that it never was for me growing up. We
insta-respond on Facebook by pressing a ‘Like’ button, and that somehow
demonstrates our political solidarity, or aesthetic preference, or temporary
pleasure, or all of the above. We insta-respond through talk radio, with one
voice reaching millions and pontificating on this or that current event,
quickly, glibly, for entertainment as well as to score political points. And
sometimes these are exactly the same: to score a quick political point is to
entertain, even if your point is superficial, or based on a straw-man version
of your opponent.
Insta-responding
is the internet. The troll is a creature of responding fast, in every newspaper
discussion page online, in any kind of entertainment forum online. When you are
responding fast, and are kind of an ass, then of course you want the ability to be
anonymous. So online responding has led to ‘discussion pages’ that are not
about discussing anything, but more like pages of one-sentence hit pieces to
vent, to smear, to feel good about yourself when you have little else to feel
good about. Responding on these ‘discussion pages’ has never changed my mind
about anything, has never illuminated me to a new perspective. It’s mostly
invective.
Of
course, where we see a constant river of insta-responding is on television, and
its news, where anchors respond to events as they unfold, before they know who
did what to whom, where reporters give preliminary (and often false)
conclusions, but who cares? The point is to respond, to capture eyeballs, to
entertain, to show the gut-wrenching images, and later, much, much later, to
make sense of it all. If anyone tunes in for that more considered perspective or
the matter-of-fact corrections the next day, that is. The TV crowd may already be on to the next
disaster, or outrage, or political fiasco. And so the wheel keeps a-spinning!
One
of the reasons TV has been the first and most important purveyor of
insta-responding is because time is money on television. If you can’t speak
(and respond quickly), then you can never be an Anderson Cooper. Every second
of ‘no talking,’ of ‘no reacting,’ is a second when the viewer can turn away,
change the channel. Advertisers hate that, and so do television executives.
When we put a price on time, on seconds, and when we put that time on an
apparatus called television, any reasonable person would have expected
‘discussions’ to be glib and quick and definitely entertaining, and with images
that would also be arresting. A split-second of an image communicates more
viscerally than anyone describing that same image. When we as a country have
most of our political discourse filtered through television, what do you, as
that reasonable person, think would happen to that discourse? ‘Discourse’ would
become ‘talk,’ and ‘thinking’ would become ‘insta-responding.’
What
kind of political candidate would be favored in this insta-responding world?
Someone who would promise to bomb all the bad guys as ‘foreign policy.’ Someone
who would say, “Trust me. Just don’t ask me too many hard questions and expect
concrete answers.” Someone who would play to your prejudices and anxieties.
Someone with all the answers, as long as these ‘answers’ are easy, digestible,
colorful, and even outrageous. Someone arrogant who makes fun of complexity and
thinking and any crap that keeps him from adulation, or as I would put it, a
slavish insta-responding to him.
Imagine
another world. Imagine a world where people would turn off their televisions,
and debate outside, over cups of coffee, and not through any filters like talk
radio hosts, but face-to-face. What would happen to empathy? Imagine if we had
hours upon hours discussing such serious issues as gun control, gun violence, the
Constitution, the United States becoming multi-racial, multi-ethnic, and
multi-religious as never before, and that these discussions would be done in
town squares, or better, through lunches, and weekly meetings that would last
until most of us got hungry. Then some of us would go out for a bite to eat.
What would happen to how we see each other?
Imagine
that many of us valued being alone, and bolstered our minds through reading,
and reading literary fiction from other worlds, and imagine that we would take
the time to read these long novels from other worlds, and so consider other
viewpoints, other societies, characters radically different from us, yet
complex characters surviving, failing, trying, loving. What would happen to who
we would consider an Other?
Imagine,
finally, that we would seek respect from others not because of the size of our
biceps or how we could punch like Holly Holm, and not because we are in an SUV
and angry and so we better goddamn get respect on the highway, and certainly
not because we had a gun in our hand, nor money in the bank, nor a cutie in
our arms. We might still need a gun to protect ourselves, and we most certainly
would need a cutie in our arms for a variety of reasons, but we would not go to
the gun because we demand insta-respect from innocents, and the cutie would be
in our arms because we read, and are calm and reliable, and that cutie is like
us, a reader, and maybe even a Trekkie or at least a sci-fi geek. We’re
imagining, okay?
It’s
not too late, America, to escape the Cave of Insta-Responding. Read. Think. Go
talk to someone different from you and take him or her out to lunch. And
respond to what you hear, but don’t just blab: write about it.
