Click hereto return to your Previous Page

"He just got a little behind in his steering" ... Cale Yarborough

(Commenting on an incident in which driver error induced rubber to fail to maintain contact with the proper road.)

Live events, like the NASCAR accident, cited above, shared simultaneously by untold millions of viewers, are the nuggets and embers of today's blue florescent global campfire: Television.

The real time live event on television, actual or simulated, is the rush we seek in our inherent desire for those rare moments of pure truth ... moments epitomized by latent memory of chills 'round the ancient traditional campfire.

If entertainment is a form of communication, and a fundamental goal in communication is the successful transmission and reception of messages, one primary tool is the art or practice of getting the listener to suspend disbelief.

Active Disbelief can act as a barrier in the communication process.

Last Saturday night, in the United States, many millions sat "together" and watched Wesley Snipes' movie: The Art of War. All viewers were subjected to practically identical stimuli as telecast then on HBO, starting at 9 PM. Our reactions may be as varied as the number of individuals sitting and soaking it up, but the material (barring variations for different time zone accommodation ) was virtually identical.

How do we know it wasn't just the three people in this house, watching, each in their own bedroom with respective sets tailored to individual liking?

More realistically, how do we measure how many others watched? How can we say, when town water pressure declines in Centerville USA, at 10:43, or whenever the movie ended, all were watching HBO?

How do we know how many were at the Discovery Channel, or Showtime Instead of HBO? Aren't there huge numbers of people with no cable or satellite TV? Don't "most" people go out on a Saturday night?

If you accept the premise that Statistical Sampling is an accurate tool for measuring tendencies of selected populations, in this case, a television viewing audience;

And you believe however many people were watching HBO on Saturday night between 9 and 11, the number of SpeedVision viewers at 7:30 EDT Sunday morning ... where Sunday's Formula 1 German Grand Prix was shown live ... was considerably less;

Then many more than 50 million people watched "The Art of War" on HBO the night before, because, by statistical measure, according to the announcers on the SpeedVision show, more than 50 million watched Sunday morning's live race.

The variable is in our perception, not the event. Some may rue the violence. Some love Wesley Snipes as if they imagine they know him personally. Some are "upset" because when the camera showed the underside of a police interrogation table, where Mr. Snipes swept almost incidentally but clearly for bugs, there might well have been gum under the table ... like in real life ... but there was no under table gum.

So many other fabulous special effects were carefully crafted ... minute detail attended to in the drive to assuage our gullibility in order to facilitate that all important disbelief suspension.

The point is, on an increasingly regular basis, more and more of us are exposed, at the same moment to precisely the same event. It is this live simultaneous relating to identical stimuli by millions of (for the moment) overtly anonymous viewers that calls the campfire analogy. What we take from an event is up to us ... but each event is itself the same.

There is a more compelling unifying interpretation at this electric blue commune than the fiction: It is live event.

Saturday's HBO movie was a live event, even though Mr. Snipes may have been somewhere else, sipping a drink perhaps, it is the depiction of incredible happenings we got live.

When something of note is telecast as it is happening, and zillions are witness to that event, then the need to render that suspension of disbelief becomes superfluous. It really is like we are all there.

Here, watchers and performers come from every variety on the planet. Differences between nations are more like the difference between our local United States used to be. We even all speak English. This is particularly evident in those fields intertwined with digital technology.

Around this digital camp fire sit unimpaired the disabled, the persecuted, the learned and the deprived all equally at the trough.

At the car wreck, the Watts Riot, the Gulf War, the Challenger Disaster, The "I Would be Remiss" speech of Johnny Cochran ...

As we bear real time mutual witness, the facility to disbelieve is increasingly bypassed. We get not digital "He said she said," we get real life, subject more to our preferences, abilities and the posture of the messenger.

We get your momma.

On the podium after the Sunday's race, as always, the national anthem of each of the first three drivers played. For first place, Ralf Schumacher, there was the German anthem. Second place Rubens Barrichello, of Brazil got to hear his National Anthem. The National Anthem of Canada was played for Third place Jacques Villeneuve.

While their respective flags fluttered in the breeze, announcers' voices could be heard in many different languages in the background. Interviews were subsequently conducted, first in English, then in each driver's native tongue.

And this really ain't TV ... it's the sputtering electric dawn of your universal Momma!

Click HERE for page top!

Previous Page