Democratic Media

Paul loves the Jerry Lewis telethon. I was less than thrilled with his enthusiasm when we returned from Chicago. But Paul got in there the first hour and was ready for the long haul (for me, this was why God makes Ambien). For him, the telethon iterates the best of a lost medium and a democratic medium, live television.

The lost part is easy: as many folks know, much of early television, pre networks, has been lost; it was never taped or recorded. Various local stations had their own shows. These shows didn't yet conform to mass norms; some were targeted at ethnic audiences.

But why democratic (and this is where I am actually less convinced)? First, the people who are on the shows are not celebrities; they are everyday people (another version of this point might be the fantasy version of reality television--but with a difference: no editing and usually only one or two cameras). So, their talents might be 'becoming' as it were. Or, they might be less polished (which was true of the telethon). Second, there is a space for contingency (another word might be low production value, but Paul's version is infused with hope and optimism). When the telethon cut to local stations, volunteers manning the phones were featured. Paul went nuts with delight at one of the volunteers--a college kid--picking his nose and snickering until the camera cut away and moved to close ups on the announcer so as to get him out of the shot.

So, there is a spirit of the common rather than the select or special and a spirit of the open and contingent rather than the determined. There is also, in Paul's democratic media imaginary, a sense of community. What's going on is a group or collective matter. So, the telethon involves lots of people, not just an announcer, lots of gestures to volunteers, donors, participants. There is an opening of the show to larger communities, and a sense of generalized participation.

And here it may be that the telethon, or live television, has democratic aspirations that have already been lost or weeded out of Web 2.0 with its individualized products, narrow, specialized audiences, and ever encroaching corporations. It could be then, that we have participation, vast participation, without democracy because a certain spirit (that perhaps was always a fantasy) has been lost.

Comments

[Seb]

While it would, indeed, be nice to imagine that live television was imbued with some sense of a democratic spirit, I somehow doubt this was actually the case. It's more likely (as you suspect) a fantasy that dovetails nicely with the myopic nostalgia for '50s America, the Good Old Days, the Boom Days, the Golden Days - completely ignoring all that was divisive, hurtful, frightening, and true of the era.

One of my in-laws constantly pines for the '50s as the last epoch of a true cultural consensus in America, and every time I wince to think how inherently wishful, naive, and not a little racist this thinking is.

[jdean]

agreed!