Article #2 -- posted April 15, 1997
The Ecstasy of Opinion
Thank you for calling, Michelle," says talkshow host Michael Krasny to a listener. "Our next caller is Joel from Livermore." Joel, it turns out, has some very strong feelings about Bosnia. No diplomatic experience, no military training, just "very strong feelings." He really wants to share them with us--and we seem to really want to hear them.
I don't get this.
As the mass media hurtles toward a new century it seems to have one thing in mind--your opinion. It's just about impossible to turn on the radio or TV, open a newspaper or magazine, or log onto the Internet without being implored: "Please, we're dying to know--what do you think?"
This media imperative used to be limited to letters to the editor, a distinctly marked section of newspapers and a very few magazines. Now it pervades the very structure of the media. Its forms now include:
In many cases people actually pay for the privilege of giving their opinions. Every December, for example, Playboy readers can select from among the 12 monthly Playmates for Playmate of the Year. Voting costs a dollar per call. Lest you think it's only horny young guys who respond to such invitations, consider the Southern California radio station that invited people to vote for their favorite Beatle--at 50 cents per call. Or the midwest TV station that invited viewers to vote on OJ's innocence or guilt--for 75 cents per call. No one claims these polls represent anything real--except the money they bring in.
Is all this audience response simply a modern version of talking with neighbors over the ol' back fence? Given the lack of neighbors and fences in most people's lives, it would be understandable.
Except I don't trust all this indiscriminate participation and alleged interest in each other's thoughts. What exactly is so interesting about strangers' opinions? After all, no one asks their waiter what he thinks about the Middle East, or asks their letter carrier her opinion on teen suicide (although you may get opinions from both if you're not careful). Yet it is precisely "regular people" who call in to shows--no expertise or careful analysis necessary, just an opinion and the desire to share it. If we don't ask our waiter or mailperson, why are we listening to strangers just like them who call or write in?
DARK SIDE
There's a dark side to this contrived media/audience macarena, the price we're all paying for these "opportunities."
The idea that everyone's opinion on every subject has worth subverts the value of expertise and fact. Opinions are like herring, and it's raining herring. We should be asking whose opinion is worth listening to. Unfortunately we now seem convinced that once expressed through the media, everyone's "feelings"--their emotional truth--form a legitimate viewpoint. This dangerous dynamic allows people to feel well-informed when they are simply opinionated, or merely exposed to the opinions of other lay people. And in a world where media exposure defines reality, it allows people to feel they have genuinely done something just because they have expressed themselves. The media have put gossip in respectable clothes, and they invite us to feel respectable by wearing them.
The whole phenomenon elevates the trivial, trivializing the significant. In an increasingly noisy world, how are we supposed to determine what is important? Indeed, if public discourse focusses on school colors as much as school violence, who's to say that it *isn't* more important? Once everything matters, nothing is inherently important.
These forums dangerously misrepresent "public opinion." Studies continually demonstrate that angry, frightened, and sad people are far more likely to express their opinion through the mass media. Thus, audiences, as well as political leaders, think they know more about "public opinion" than they actually do; we believe our neighbors are more upset than they are. To listen to Rush Limbaugh's show, you'd think America was on the verge of mass homicide or vigilantism. While his callers may be, his audience as a whole is far less so.
"COMMUNICATION" OR SOMETHING ELSE?
Media professionals and audience alike seem delighted about the enhanced "communication" among audience members and between audience and media. But "communication" implies an exchange of thought and an openness to being touched, however briefly. What we typically see is not meaningful exchange.
Expressing one's opinion through the media is usually about feeling better, not about engaging in dialogue. People in this environment rarely listen to each other, or think anything they didn't already believe before they shared their thoughts. No one's mind is changed, because no one is interested in being changed. Rather than reconciling or synthesizing audience members' heterogeneous, discontinuous ideas, today's media forms merely contain them.
People participate in today's orgy of verbal intercourse not to understand more, but to feel anxious less. We all feel overwhelmed by too much information and complex situations, and listening to strangers' typically simple opinions is a way of feeling less overwhelmed.
And so rather than facilitating actual "communication," today's media has created a product out of 1) people's opinions and 2) the sharing of these opinions. The media now markets this product which, for various reasons, people eagerly consume.
In doing so, the media imply that:
As Berkeley sociologist Todd Gitlin says, the consumer society's genius is "its ability to convert the desire for change into a desire for novel goods." And there is now a supply of novel goods that is literally unlimited--others' opinions. In a brilliant marketing ploy, the media have convinced us that participating in opinion-swapping is good for us and our loved ones.
In fact, in a dramatic change from the past, today's media state that one of their roles is encouraging people to share their opinions, and they congratulate themselves on how well they do this. The media have given themselves the responsibility of "creating a community," thus redesigning themselves as an institution.
We fall for this because most of us lack a sufficient experience of real community; virtual community is the best many of us can now get. We log on at night to interact with what really matters to us. We identify more with the Knicks than with our own religious tradition. At work, we marvel together at the pathetic judgment of Oprah's guests. So the fact that the media takes pride in creating pseudo-community, and that we enjoy it so much, is no surprise.
But we should be concerned about the kind of "community" being facilitated by the media's enticement. It's generally focussed on problems, on emotions like anger and fear, and on opinion rather than thought or analysis. It's a community in which subjectivity ("I feel") is aggrandized as participation ("I do"). The apparent spontaneity is contrived, and the seeming intimacy is really just temporary affinity at a great psychological distance.
The national talkshows reconvene this pseudo-community daily. The typical talkshow features a half-dozen panelists describing the distress in their lives, and a studio audience that is expected to comment meaningfully on this distress. These average people are asked what they think about random subjects, ostensibly because that's how a community functions, and because listening to such opinions is supposedly how we viewers better understand ourselves and each other.
But what is it that we understand better? People talk (or yell) past each other, and audience members state opinions they had before the show started about stereotypes rather than real humans--"sluts," "homewreckers," "chauvinist pigs." We're not watching to understand ourselves better. We're watching for the same reason that we crane our necks at freeway accidents. This isn't "community," and it isn't "communication."
JACKIE & THE SWAN
The S.F. Opera recently produced Lohengrin, and used a symbolic rather than real swan. The San Francisco Chronicle mentioned this briefly and asked readers if they cared--and did they ever. The two sides were soon fiercely debating the artistic and philosophical merits of real and symbolic swans in the paper. Reporters felt it was much more interesting than what they had written.
The San Jose Mercury-News had a similar experience. When Jacqueline Onassis died, they asked readers to describe what she'd meant to them. The response was huge. Readers apparently enjoyed the emotions and memories they shared with each other more than anything a journalist would have written.
And so people nowadays tune in, open the paper, or log on to see what's happening--defining "news" as people's opinions on topics selected for them, instead of what's actually happening in the world, or what it means. The blending of media access, opinion, and real life can be seen in the sports talk show industry. There the invitation for public venting has created a new, continual pressure on both athletes and management. Last year, for example, the Seattle Supersonics planned to trade basketball star Shawn Kemp for Chicago's Scotty Pippen. People flooded the local radio sports talkshows with negative calls. The owner of the Sonics, who also happened to own the radio station, canceled the trade.
I follow pro sports and I certainly have my opinions--I say the Giants should keep Barry Bonds and just acquire a half-dozen good players--but I sure don't want coaches paying attention to what fans (including me) think. We simply don't have access to the information that coaches, scouts, executives, trainers and players themselves do. We fans can think with our hearts, but coaches, players, and execs shouldn't.
BACK TO--WHY?
With the incredible popularity of vehicles asking for--and getting--our opinion, we have to go back to what people are getting from this peculiar interaction.
Clearly, it's a way for people to feel heard. Callers/writers/Net posters not only want to air their thoughts, they want to verbalize their frustration, anxiety, fear, and anger. This is only one of the many (sometimes contradictory) ways in which the media help people feel connected to others. Other ways include:
Whether expressing oneself or listening to others express themselves, then, swapping opinions helps us feel connected--not with others we know, but with anonymous others we temporarily bond with to overcome loneliness, alienation, and a sense of smallness in an overwhelming world. Getting "informed" or "a broader perspective" is very much beside the point.
There's one more reason people log on, read, and listen to total strangers--voyeurism. We like to hear how odd others can be, how wrong their choices or values can be, and how titillating their sexuality can be.
New York disc jockey Barry Gray should know--he invented the call-in radio show. On the air and bored at 3 AM back in 1945, he once answered his phone and conversed on the air with his caller, who happened to be Woody Herman. People responded, so WOR extended the format. Gray's explanation is classic: "people like to eavesdrop." Today's media make doing so easier than ever. How else can we explain Sally Jessy's recent decision to put 9-year-olds on her show, pleading with their mommies to dress less sexy? The audience ravenously booed the moms at the same time that they devoured the cleavage, thigh, and attitude the women showed. The program was a huge success--except, of course, for the poor kids--as a pseudo-community of millions shared an experience and world of meaning. Sally Jessy and her fans can talk about "education" and "learning about ourselves" all they want, but audiences in the studio or at home only care about the people on stage because they let us peek at their underwear. Once these same people are out on the street, audience members will yell at them for driving too slowly, splash them if they walk too close to the curb, shove them aside when competing for a cab, and curse them for panhandling a buck for a sandwich.
It's tempting to close with a "get a life" message: if you want to know what "others" think, ask a real someone, a someone you care about like your mate, friends, or kids. And if you have strong feelings about something, do something about it in the real world, instead of telling a bunch of strangers. I do have one opinion I freely give when the media disingenuously asks what I think about some area outside my expertise: I don't trust your asking my opinion. Just go do your job. And stop telling me what everyone else thinks. I have real life for that.
© 2003 Marty Klein, Ph.D. All rights reserved.
Please do not reproduce without permission.
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