Doing Emotions History

Chapter 9. Media, Messages, and Emotions

CHaPtEr 9 mEDia, mEssagEs, anD Emotions Br Ento n J. m a li n Communication media inevitably raise questions about emotion. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates worries about the emotional effects of writing—the new mediumofhistime.Talking withPhaedrus,ayoungmanwhobringsawritten speechtohim,Socratesexpressesconcernforthe“frenziedenthusiasm”hebelievesitislikelytoproduceinthosewhoreadit .AmongthefaultsthatSocrates finds with writing is that it “doesn’t know how to address the right people, and not to address the wrong.”1 Because a written script, unlike a live speech, does notrequireapersontodeliverit,itcannotmakechoicesaboutwhereandwhen nottocommunicateandcannotanswerquestionsthatinterlocutorsmightpose to it. How Socrates addresses the speech is telling in these regards as well. It is a pharmakon—a drug, or charm; it is the original source for the English word pharmacy. Divorced from a speaker, Socrates argues, writing has a powerful and intoxicating affect over the emotions of its reader.2 ThischapterconsiderslinksbetweenmediaandemotioninamodernAmerican context. Like Socrates, the people I discuss are concerned with media’s capacity to stimulate and transmit emotions. While many worry about the negativeeffectsoffrenziedenthusiasm,however,otherscelebratetheemotional unification they presume to be created by the new media of their age. These often conflicted discussions illustrate what Leo Marx, David Nye, and James Carey describe as the rhetoric of the technological or electrical sublime—an idea that they argue has dominated the American experience of technology. 185 media, messages, and Emotions New technologies have consistently been celebrated as saint and condemned as Satan, often for precisely the same technological power. Iwillargue thatthisrhetoricmakesthe mostsensewhenviewedwithinthe framework of a broader history of emotion. At the same time that Americans became increasingly concerned about how to manage their emotions, film, radio, and the phonograph found a place both in American homes and in the research practices of a range of social scientists. Among the most interesting andconflictedofthesearethosemediatechnologiesusedbyscientiststostudy the emotional effects of the media themselves. Psychologists and others undertook such experiments as hooking people up to motion picture recorders to capture the impact of motion pictures on their emotions, attempting to use the presumed emotional power of motion picture technology against itself. This chapter traces some of these understandings of emotion in order to tell a story about how American media critics have wrestled with questions of the affective life. I begin by showing some thinking about emotion and media that preceded the explosion of mass media and mass media criticism in the early twentieth century. I then lay out some key popular and academic understandingsofmediafromtheearlytwentiethcentury .ForthethinkersIdiscuss, emotions were predominantly individual sensations stored in human bodies in the same way they were presumed to be stored in phonograph records and motion pictures. From here, I move to late-twentieth-century modifications and extensions of these ideas and then discuss their continued relevance at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The approach to media established in the early twentieth century was largely an ahistoric, decontextualized one. While this opened up the study of particular physiological and emotional effects, it also made it difficult to explore a number of other areas of the emotional life. Theearlytwenty-firstcenturyhasseentheemergenceofamorecontextualapproach to mediated emotion, even as a more narrowly physiological approach is gaining strong footing in the larger culture. ElECtriC fEElings Soonafteritsdiscovery,electricitybegananimportantrelationshiptotheemotions in Western culture. In the eighteenth century, Italian scientist Luigi Galvani discovered that he could make a frog’s leg contract by applying electricity to it. This demonstrated to Galvani and other scientists that electricity was a fundamentalpartofanimalandhumanbodies;scientistspracticingGalvanism suggested that electric currents could cure everything from sciatica and rheumatism to herpes and constipation.3 The eighteenth-century science of Mes- 186 b rEn to n J. m a l i n merism,oranimalmagnetism,asitsinventorFranzMesmercalledit,heldthat it was electrical forces that were responsible for the attraction of both physical andsocialbodies.Loversweredrawntoeachotherwithnolesselectricalforce than positively and negatively charged magnets.4 Electricity was a vital force with an important role in people’s physical and emotional health. Because it harnessed electricity for communication, Morse’s nineteenthcentury telegraph struck many as an especially strong conveyor of emotion. A range of critics worried about the overstimulation of the high-speed telegraph even as others celebrated its ability to create a global village of shared feelings. “Themagnetictelegraphsearcheseverynookandcorneroftheworldeveryday, dragging into light, not only every crime that is committed, but every disagreeablefeatureofhumansociety ,”wroteonenineteenth-centurycommentator.5 A letter in the Philadelphia Medical Times from 1883 similarly noted that “when a man only got his letters in the morning he was pretty safe from surprises for the rest of the day; but with the telegraph he has no remission from anxiety and is onthetenterhooksalldaylong.”Becauseofthisexcessiveexcitement,thewriter...