about Megyn Kelly's cold, hard stare

Megyn Kelly and NBC faced a lot of criticism last week ahead of their decision to air a piece on controversial conspiracist Alex Jones during Kelly's new Sunday night show. Why give Jones a platform for his odious views? The guy claims the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was staged or faked to undermine private gun ownership rights.

But after the interview aired, media critics grudgingly formed a consensus that the segment was a success. The Washington Post piece "Facing Alex Jones, NBC's Megyn Kelly manages to avoid a worst-case outcome" is typical:

Rather than let Jones run away with it, "Sunday Night" let him show himself to be an impertinent, ill-informed, foulmouthed, possibly deranged egomaniac with a forehead constantly beaded in sweat. It showed viewers how Infowars grew and sustains itself by peddling right-wing merchandise and Jones-endorsed dietary supplements. It looked briefly back at Jones's early days as just another cable-access kook in Austin, and revealed the flimsy, almost nonexistent definition of "research" (articles he and his staff find online) that sets the Infowars agenda.

... Good night and good luck, in a "Sunday Night With Megyn Kelly" kind of world, has been replaced with the cold, hard stare. Which, as it happens, remains Kelly's surest and perhaps only journalistic asset.

This piece withholds journalistic credit from Kelly, arguing that Alex Jones revealed himself to be a sweaty, crackpot buffoon. The Post just gives Kelly credit for her icy stare. She deserves more. Jones counterattacked with accusations of media liberal bias. But Kelly refused to engage on Jones's terms. A lot of other journalists would have been baited. By remaining on the offensive, Kelly allowed her righteous narrative to prevail. And Jones, as the Post points out, looked crazy--with a lot of help from Kelly.

about "White Noise" by Don DeLillo

White Noise follows events surrounding a Midwest college professor, with much attention given to his family, a Brady Bunch-type arrangement. Our professor, Jack Gladney, is known for his unique academic departmental creation, Hitler Studies; this bit matters because it embodies a major theme in the novel: information overload--how each and every thing is problematized and probed and its hidden data and meaning is wrung out, spilling out into the air. Each source is inexhaustible, but ultimately, exhausted, you wonder whether all this data mining yielded knowledge or pollution.

The novel's action and dialog is immersed in data: trivia, reports, news, questions, answers, rhetorical questions, interrogations, analysis, meta analysis, educated guesses, second guesses, and so on. In the narrative, this information overload is symbolized by a toxic cloud that materializes over the town after a train wreck and chemical spill. The threat prompts a second theme (also represented in the cloud): fear of death. Jack Gladney is exposed to the cloud for perhaps too long and a fear of death sets in. But, after the real toxic cloud dissolves in microbiotic fury, Gladney learns his wife has struggled with an intense fear of death for months, and that she even sought help for it through an obscure, experimental pharmaceutical trial, taking pills to cure the fear. After dragging along these plot points for a time, at the end, out of nowhere, the novel takes a bizarre twist involving a murder attempt.

The characters are unrealistic and unlikable, each taking turns dismissing whatever the other characters choose to dwell on. They are all stupid quirky buffoons with no bullshit threshold. The cloud event is ridiculous because it starts out catastrophic but is quickly dealt with and rarely mentioned again. Gradually, during the reading I lost all motivation to consider the novel seriously.

Notes:

• The novel says nothing about it, but "information overload" might be one of those fears that pops up every couple generations.

information

When I pass through, without fail I catch her engaged in conversations so dull you could trust a depressed, slight-wristed teenaged girl to leave them alone. Remote facts input via phones plugged into NPR or some trivia podcast, briefly unbothered in her database mind, at the first opportunity, and often before that, find a second life output as one of many banalities confidently shared for everyone's sake.

Siri and iPhone 4S (or whatever it is) commercial

See the two commercials for the iPhone 4S: one with Samuel L. Jackson and the other with a "Zooey Deschanel". Note the repartee between actor and phone. What are they selling?

Most immediately, they are selling Command. Command requires a commander, someone who controls, who navigates, who regulates; in this case, the phone owner. Command also requires the attention of another, someone willing to take as her will the will of the commander; she is the audience--in this case, the phone.

But what need does Command satisfy? What common desire are the marketers exploiting?

We're buying the license to indulge our own personality. To indulge, to express the self to the machine for the benefit of the self. Notice how the characters run a commentary, as if entertaining the phone; but really they are entertaining themselves.

When we narrate for and "interact" with Siri, we can act obnoxious or cute, voice whatever witticism, drivel, passing thought and fancy that would otherwise shrivel and die as things do when they are unfit for survival. But now such behavior is legitimized because now you have a (captive) audience, which, in your mind, makes you a star, a sovereign without territory, holding court with your first and only servant.

But that is the illusion. What is the actual effect?

Man, obliterated again and again by technologies since the industrialized age, seeks yet again to actualize himself through more technology, this time through the validation that comes with getting recognized by the machine--the machine that consumes him.

He doesn't speak to a person through the phone; he speaks to the phone, and the phone answers him. But it answers not the way a patient parent answers her insufferable child. Rather, he merely hears the mechanized echo of his own voice and mistakes it for contact. And rather than grow up, he grows even more dependent until he can't function without it. He is obliterated in his discourse with the machine that tolerates him, for, in this discourse, no one is learning about him, growing to like to him (or hate him), getting used to him, making him more compassionate or better or more patient--indeed, probably the opposite is true. He regresses into infancy.

But now he is old.

Notes:

• I don't know who a "Zooey Deschanel" is but judging by an images search it's a professional face maker.