American Notebook The Mike in the Bosom
Hausknecht, Murray
The television show Person to Person employs a technician whose job is to hide a small microphone in the bosoms of women who appear on the show so that the women may be heard without the...
...By de stroying the solidarity of a group which depends, in large part, upon almost unlimited trust, the informer undermines the supports for behavior which challenges the accepted norms of society...
...Such trivialization of symbolic figures is the obverse side of the transformation of emotions and intimate experiences into commodities...
...The minister can be a symbol of that resistance, but if one resorts to the mass media it is impos Bible to be taken as a figure of "resistance," since these media are not organized for the expression of resistance...
...But the basis for the establishment of trust is privacy which, in turn, is being destroyed by television and other media...
...Each requires its own setting...
...But the amount of conformity that is required varies...
...When the man slips the mike into the bosom, without causing anyone perceptible embarrassment, he helps train us for the time when we shall willingly do the job for ourselves...
...It adequately describes, I think, one meaning of popular culture...
...As a Madison Avenue philosopher might put it, a mike in the bosom is worth 100,000 words on paper...
...but on This is Your Life and Strike It Rich what the sponsor buys are the feelings, emotions, and intimate relationships of the participant, that is, precisely those elements of life, beside work skills, which define him as a distinct human being...
...We may now have a perspective from which to view the social consequences of the trivialization of emotions and intimate relationships...
...For, as with the invasion of privacy, this continual exposure to the disintegration of other people's identities creates an environment in which it is difficult to maintain a high valuation of our own identity...
...These two shows are notable for their exquisite refinement of the process of alienation...
...When any group has control of the environment it is comparatively easy to socialize the members through the classical methods of censorship, etc...
...Once the latter becomes institutionalized—as he seems well on his way to becoming— one must always act in strict conformity with the prescribed discipline since the betrayer may be professional colleague, son, or trusted friend...
...As soon as these aspects of personality are transformed into commodities, as well as means of titillating the sado-masochistic impulses of an audience, they become alien characteristics, and, as such, they cannot serve as bases for a defense against the pressures of a restrictive society...
...television is only the latest instrument...
...The industrial worker sells his labor powel and relinquishes control over his tools and product...
...it represents the standard of conformity...
...it is also congruent with other forces pushing in exactly the same direction...
...Fortune reports that in the "new-middle class" communities it is virtually impossible to keep the neighbors from invading one's living room at the slightest pretext or without any pretext at all...
...But this argument misses the point...
...That is, if you throw a Krishna Menon in with a Gabor, bill the entire "package" as entertainment, and sell it through television you have gone a long way toward creating an image of an unambiguous world...
...Murrow and his show because more often than not it is conducted with urbanity and wit, which distracts our attention from its inherent vulgarity...
...Increasingly, support for behavior and thought which deviate from the ever tightening norms comes from such small groups as the family, one's friends, etc...
...This process must be understood with reference to a cliche that haunts all discussions of television: It brings the world into our living rooms...
...Nor is resistance the only thing which cannot be expressed...
...We must not be deluded into thinking that this is the participants' problem and not ours...
...by giving both equal value it trivializes the significance of one of them...
...In the dim world of mass culture he stands out as a startlingly clear figure...
...Murrow, the ubiquitous camera, and the hidden mike we poke and pry at nearly everything that is exposed to us—television doth make voyeurs of us all...
...Not all celebrities have equal value or the same symbolic status...
...he brings other living rooms into ours...
...he is teaching us adjustment to a future nightmare...
...Murrow has hit upon the most intriguing variation of this theme...
...What is crucial is the fact that the mass media present the world in such a manner that the inherent complexities and ambiguities which challenge the norms of society cannot emerge...
...But the significance of the mingling of living rooms and the lowering of barriers must be seen in a broader context...
...After a few minutes of conversation in which we are introduced to the host, his family and pets—the inevitable whimsy—we are taken on a tour of the home...
...II Every society or group has the persistent problem of getting people to behave in a way that maintains the existent social structure...
...The television show Person to Person employs a technician whose job is to hide a small microphone in the bosoms of women who appear on the show so that the women may be heard without the apparatus being visible to the audience...
...For what we are often tempted to forget is that Person to Person is merely one end of a continuum at the other end of which is This is Your Life and Strike It Rich...
...The invasion of privacy is, in effect, a subversion of these groups...
...The main drift of contemporary society is clearly toward the first of these...
...Since privacy is an end in itself, the destruction of privacy is to be condemned...
...The strength of television as a promoter of discipline does not derive solely from its intrinsic appeal...
...We are saying that it is becoming harder to seize upon the ambiguities which pervade all spheres of action and use them to explore other alternatives, because the disciplines are being so narrowed as to eliminate these ambiguities...
...To be sure, the process of breaking down the private sphere of life has been going on for a long time...
...Another question, Does it make a difference how it pours?, has apparently never been considered at all...
...When we talk of the pressures for conformity we are saying in effect that it is increasingly difficult for individuals to bring their own distinctive styles to their social roles...
...Again, television is not the only medium which distorts the meaning and significance of symbolic figures...
...It is also clear that Mr...
...In the lingua franca of contemporary sociology there is the term, "anticipatory socialization," which means, roughly, behaving now in a way which will make adjustment in some future situation easier...
...Murrow's most fascinating wiles: Person to Person consists of two "visits" on the same night, and, with real ingenuity and obvious enjoyment, he tries for incongruity rather than harmony...
...But there are other methods beside censorship or physical isolation which do not require the same degree of environmental control...
...Will Herberg points out that a biblical faith is a declaration of resistance against the claims of society...
...Person to Person is not as crude as all this, but it differs only in degree...
...This, combined with the uncritical acceptance of the Person to Person show, suggests how far we have come from the innocence of the nineteenth century with its motto, "A man's home is his castle...
...On the one extreme there is the discipline of a military organization where the goal is as much uniformity of behavior as possible...
...This tactful technician—he is said to do his job with courtesy and discretion—is, I would suggest, symbolic of the main drift of contemporary society...
...Murrow turns to our "host," the exterior of the home disappears and we plunge inside...
...the artfully hidden mike eliminates another barrier between us and what is happening in that room...
...Then, as Mr...
...Person to Person is, after all, a lineal descendant of the covers of Time which within a month may feature anyone from Howdy Doody to David Ries man...
...Murrow, like the rest of his fraternity, has a ready answer to the question, Do we want the world continually pouring into our living room...
...If...
...Obviously, Mr...
...Such a juxtaposition, while it tickles our fancy, also blurs the distinction between the meaning of a Krishna Menon and a Gabor...
...His success in converting the New Testament into a gospel of Positive Thought is, in part, due to his ability to destroy his own symbolic status as a minister...
...Consider Person to Person as we see it after the tactful technician has done his work...
...This brings us back to the Peeping Toms of television...
...With Edward R. Murrow we look at a picture of one of the homes we are going to "drop in on" that night...
...Perhaps this will become clearer once we recognize that television is first cousin to the informer...
...This same philosopher could also point out that the people appearing on these shows are usually "celebrities...
...The norms which prescribe the approved behavior may be conceived of as the "discipline" of the society or group...
...But it is the most important, if for no other reason than that in mass communication the printed page is not as powerful as what can be seen or heard...
...Life in a goldfish bowl is transformed from metaphor into accepted reality...
...First, and most obviously, the penetration of the home by camera and microphone creates a frame of reference for accepting this as expected and conventional behavior...
...This simple fact is the basis for one of Mr...
...Along with Mr...
...people who live their private lives publicly...
...One of his earliest programs epitomized this strategy—Krishna Menon and one of the Gabor sisters within the same half hour...
...And with the help of his tactful technician he allows us to snuggle up closely to this other living room...
...Murrow seduces us while his competitors try to rape us...
...Toward the other extreme is the discipline of science: The norms of the "scientific method," unlike military norms, prescribe behavior and thought only within very wide limits...
...One such method involves the distortion of the meanings of certain symbols and actions which represent alternative beliefs and behavior...
...What I am getting at here may become clearer by way of a Norman Vincent Peale...
...to put them into the same "medium" is to invoke a kind of Gresham's Law of Communication...
...A medium which is predominantly devoted to the production of entertainment and the use of individual talent as a come-on for the hard sell, cannot simultaneously be used for "education" or the "spread of culture...
...I pick on Mr...
Vol. 4 • January 1957 • No. 1
