Bogosian is always trying to get at the heart of complacency, but I think he challenges his readers and viewers to understand that complacency is not always what it seems. In Suburbia his characters were washed-up twenty-somethings -- too young to actually be washed up at all. Talk Radio has a slightly different focus. Barry Champlain may be washed-up, he may not. He may be brilliant, he may be a farce. But he's got a mouthpiece and that's enough to keep him going.
While reading it I tried to put my finger on exactly what the relevance of this play for a class on the commenting feedback loop was. Certainly the endless loop of callers who were supposedly interacting with each other through Barry's show were "commenting" on some level. But those comments weren't able to build off of each other in any meaningful way. Instead, Barry served as gatekeeper -- cutting off everyone but himself and yet no more or less profound or stupid as his callers.
The callers are part complacent, part oblivious, part self-obsessed, and part oblivious. But that doesn't mean that their impact is negligible. It only means that Barry is the broadcast tower that projects them. I believe Bogosian's ultimate focus is on the loneliness of life and the search for meaning. This is not a dramatic departure from his characters in Suburbia, either. Those kids were just a little nicer to each other as they stumbled around looking for the path to meaning.
As readers we can judge them on their substance, but that seems shortsighted. Talk radio is not journalism. Their is no reporting in the mouthpieces that sound off, or let their listeners do the same. Instead its like group therapy. Which can have a greater impact on public opinion than the facts and figures. So the hard-nosed who/what/where/when/why of journalism has to compete against the analysis and exposition of the neurotic self. On a Birmingham School level, we have to recognize that giving a broadcast tower to expound upon the inane inner workings of a woman afraid of her garbage disposal is not something that can be so quickly dismissed. Listeners will interact with texts (whether auditory, on paper, or visual) in a way that is not purely passive.
But contrast the forum for "discussion" on the talk radio program with the breadth and scope of the Internet. There is no Barry standing in the way to hit the "off" button. Granted some sites are moderated and others are not, but ultimately whether you are terrified of your garbage disposal or convinced the panda bears are dying off you now have a way to connect with others who agree with you. And no one is going to hang up on you and shut it down. (I should preface this with the point that this assumes that we maintain net neutrality).
The content of Barry's show don't get us any closer to solutions. In a lot of ways the play is a classic Gen-X reactionary text that leans towards frustration and apathy over any sort of concrete action. And as I was reading I was reminded of the following quotes from this recent post on TechPresident:
Imagine for a moment being one of us. Taught in school that all people are created equal, that all countries are sovereign, that freedom, democracy, and capitalism are embraced by all people and nations because they are ultimate ideals that allow us to prosper and live as we choose in the pursuit of happiness. Old enough to read the New York Times online and blog on Huffington Post, we see a very different world. Equality? Not for the poor, not for LGBT. Capitalism? It appears to have been a house of cards recklessly constructed by greed for the benefit of a few. Sovereignty? Not for resource-poor or oil-rich countries. Ideals? Not for the media or our political and business leaders.
...
The problems and the contradictions being left to us are so big that there are no easy answers. It appears that everything has to be undone, before it can redone. So let us figure out how we want to proceed. Let us "waste" our time like Mark Zuckerberg building a 150-million person online network because it may be the only hope we have. Your generation doesn't know what it means to be a global citizen the way our generation will have to. And those values you taught us, they seem pretty empty when you don't act on them yourselves. If you want us to change the world, don’t look at your sixteen-year-old listening to an iPod while writing on Facebook and watching YouTube and yell at him that he's wasting his privileges. Instead, start cleaning up your own messes. Lead by example. End your own hypocrisies. Start caring about the rest of the world and not just yourselves.
What do you think?
"Talk radio is not journalism." You start to say why but never quite sell me on your stance, Candace.
ReplyDeleteYou go on to say, "Listeners will interact with texts (whether auditory, on paper, or visual) in a way that is not purely passive. I agree wholeheartedly. That's how we make meaning. And for some, obviously, talk radio provides some scaffolding on that front.
Pre-Web, talk radio was an outlet to hear many voices sound off on a particular topic. Granted, as Talk Radio dramatically shows, the mouthpiece or the gatekeeper producer might have her or his own agenda to push, or the callers might be more mockable than illuminating. But the platform did showcase multiple voices.
My group therapy argument wasn't good enough for you? Okay, I can give you more...
ReplyDeleteI'm not arguing against talk radio as an institution for meaning-making. On that nice, academic scaffolding we can legitimize talk radio's existence. But I wouldn't make the argument that talk radio is journalism. Or, to be fair, not the talk radio featured in the play. Sounding off is not journalism. Sounding off is entertainment. Journalism holds those in power accountable. I'm not arguing that talk radio can't. I would argue that Bogosian's macho-rebellious cool cat is off on a personal philosophic journey. It has value, but it's not journalism.
Talk radio, as we know it today, has its own sordid history in the United States. Bogosian may have written the play in mid-1980s, but being just a young toddler myself in the grand decade of neon and new wave, all I can really hear is a Rush Limbaugh or a Sean Hannity. And though the rise of the right-wing conservative talk radio is often related to the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, it was really the 1996 Telecommunications Act -- which repealed ownership limits on radio stations -- that turned the local downtown station into a repeater tower for the nationally syndicated ideology of the right-wing. Which returns me to the whole idea of gatekeeping and meaning-making. It was pretty easy for U.S. politics to turn to the right when talking heads who were cheaper to syndicate than paying for local reporters and investigative journalism.
After watching the film (and I presume that Bogosian oversaw screenplay and had his hand in direction as well) it just becomes more clear that this is about the one-man's libertarian journey for meaning and not about the institution itself.
And fun as it is, it sure ain't about journalism...