Among the many things were interested in, here at cac.ophony, are the roles of context, genre and different types of media in shaping communication. (The medium is the message, after all.) Given this, and iIn anticipation of the soon to be televised presidential debates, we give you a provocative tidbit to chew on. Here, via if:book, is a remarkable interview with Marshall McLuhan from the Today show in 1976, in which the famed theorist of media analyzes the televised presidential debates of that year and argues that the tried and true genre of the presidential debate is “completely the wrong form for the medium of television.” Bob Stein of if:book notes that
it’s hard to imagine an interview like this on the Today show of 2008. It goes on for ten uninterrupted minutes; there are no cut-aways to video footage or text crawls at the bottom of the screen; and most significantly McLuhan speaks his mind, critical of the mechanisms of political discourse to an extent unimaginable in today’s sanitized mass media landscape.
[youtube]httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZF8jej3j5vA[/youtube]
Great find Mikhail. A+ to NBC for the format. I figured that things weren’t always as terrible as they are today on television and it’s nice to see some proof. On the other hand, C- to Prof. McLuhan for being droningly, unenlighteningly repetitive and for his overuse of self-created analytical terminology w/o any explanation. B- to the interviewers for not calling him on it. Sicne I’m grading, I’ll go ahead and risk a prediction of F- for the usual farcical, vacuous, pop-fad baloney we’re about to witness Friday (despite the welcome relief of having a relatively responsible moderator instead of some buffoon like Gge. Stephanopolous).
Interesting assessment, Ryan. In McLuhan’s defense, it was Tom Brokaw who launched in with the jargon.
On another note, the upcoming debates are said to be a “historic breakthrough” in terms of format. They supposedly will invite a degree of the sort of unscripted exchange that McLuhan says the televised debates should be. See here.
Well, I’ll be the first to admit it if I’m pleasantly surprised. I’ll have to see it to believe it though, as the contract signed by both parties — dictating format, topics etc. — is the result of months of negotiation between Lindsay Graham (R) and Rahm Emanuel (D). Recent “historic breakthroughs” borught to us by our wonderful political parties haven’t been much to my liking. It’s harder to prepare for an oral exam than a presidential debate in my opinion: the former sometimes requires complete, multi-clause sentences and you don’t know what you’ll be asked. Forgive my cynicism; I watch too much C-SPAN I think.Fair piont on the jargon. Perhaps that stuff was common parlance back then.
So, Ryan and Mikhail, what are your verdicts based on what you saw Friday evening? Even with McLuhan’s words about scripting ringing loudly in my ears as I watched the debate, it was hard not to think how rigidly scripted the message was in this case. Clearly, Jim Lehrer (and the entire TV medium) was fighting an uphill battle in getting the candidates to go off script, since at this point the two have “debated” so many dozens of times they lock into autopilot at the mention of any number of buzz words. This raises the question of what it takes for a moderator to inject dynamism into a debate between opponents professing such scripted messages. It certainly takes more than begging the candidates to talk to one another. When prompted by Leherer to directly converse with McCain, Obama simply turned his head 90 degrees to the right with a smile on his face and repeated the same statement translated into the second person. McCain altogether ignored such pleas. Back to McLuhan, was it the medium that confined engagement between the candidates? Maybe it was the studio set: would a coffee table between the debaters help? Or maybe the whole thing should have been moved from the lecture hall to the set of Cheers so deep conversation could flourish over a few mugs of beer.