The celebrated television journalist and anchor of ABC’s “Nightline,” Ted Koppel, shared a memorable nugget with Duke’s Class of ’87 at commencement. With a curious but charming coined term, he warned that optimistic graduating class that America was becoming “Vannatized.” When the word was first uttered, we all felt that he had caught us basking and aloof in our state of late-80s narcissism.
Koppel’s commentary, intentionally designed for ambiguity, fell upon our ears as “Vanitized,” which we interpreted as some sagacious, obscure derivation of the word “vanity,” By the time we thought we understood him, he immediately corrected us with the follow-up: “As in Vanna White—‘Wheel of Fortune’s’ Vestal Virgin.” The commencement address took a turn toward the hilarious from that point on, offering a scorching spotlight on what Koppel observed as an over-indulgence in the proliferation of materialistic, generic, ambiguous and inane factors, especially in the media. He later placed them in relief to his ideas of truth, moral certainty and responsibility.
Koppel’s choice of focal character at the beginning of that speech could not have been more prescient, since Vanna White (who, from a vantage point of distant observation, is a decent human being who has pursued her activities and career honorably enough) was made famous for rotating illuminated blocks with letters.
The “Wheel of Fortune” solution blocks were always part of a string of words that represented the most commonplace phrases available to anyone in Western culture who spoke English.
The object of the game—similar to Hangman—is to vociferate the whole phrase before another contestant solves it. After the phrase was revealed, Vanna White could exercise another activity of distinction found in her online biography—this, from her website: “In 1992, Vanna was recognized in ‘The Guinness Book of World Records’ as ‘Television’s Most Frequent Clapper.’ Averaging 720 claps per episode, she puts her hands together more than 28,000 times per season.” From all appearances, she is virtually an infinite fountain of ovation, even though the solutions to the puzzles logistically must have required pretty restrictive character limits.
This brings me to contemplate the advent of the “140 character or less” mantra that has become all the rage in recent technological communication. Yes, Twitter is paradoxically huge and still growing, and the practice of immediacy and brevity seems to have a solid hold on our already infinitesimal attention spans. In pondering this phenomenon, I’ve begun to wonder if this platform is appropriate in all circumstances. Sure, to those whose scopes delight in text-based peephole peering into the lives of Paris Hilton and Curtis Jackson III, it’s an ideal format! Also, if you are in a position as a private citizen and you feel that your voice and/or situation needs to be vented to the larger public, then it’s a good fit for you, too.
Now, please don’t mistake this message. The shrinking of verbal, temporal and literary space can often be highly effective—and even preferable in scenarios of strategic philosophical or poetic cadence, and when there is no intent of profundity or long-term consequence.
However, this new trend of politicians and people of actual societal responsibility expressing themselves—usually inelegantly—in 140 characters or fewer is something that might give us pause.
So, to politicians (present and future) and political wanna-bes, here are a couple of salient ideas, offered in your language of newsflash talking points:
1) American ideas and ideals are complicated, and you insult our intelligence by pretending that you can do us a favor by popping out “tweets” major on policy debates.
2) You are neither deep, nor are you poets, so your aphorisms, though sometimes able to wave smoke and flames, are, more often than not, just immature and unbecoming; your “tweets” place you closer to Paris Hilton than Abraham Lincoln, whose Gettysburg Address would fail the 140-character litmus test.
In this age of the wondrous art of shrinkage, we have benefited from the microchip, the mp3 and its variety of minuscule players, and we’ve even managed to scrunch the keyboards from our already tiny laptops into the screen of our iPads. But when it comes to the impact of compressing ideas and ideals worthy of ample space, I tend to heed Koppel’s cautionary appeal to beware the false idols of intellectual miniaturization. Today, they come to us in the form of the politically manipulative sound bite, the quick, superficial radio hit song and the sociologically myopic “Talking Point.” We, as a responsible public, must consciously sort through the important qualitative difference between those modes of human expression and more substantial, consequential streams of communication at our disposal.
Oops. I’m already running out of space in this column, so I’d better close. If you want to talk more, come over to Brown Dorm, where I might be tuning in to a Mahler Symphony.
Anthony Kelley, Trinity, ’87, is an associate professor of the practice in the Department of Music and the faculty member in residence in Brown Dormitory. This is the fifth in a weekly column from faculty members in residence on East Campus.
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