The following is commenting on the discussion about how social media exaggerates life and how that impacts us.
page 216-219Decades before the internet’s invention, producers of early television coined the term “the coconut effect,” referring to any sound or special effect diverced from reality but whose presence was required since viewers had come to expect it.
Think here of the dried, empty coconuts that were clapped together in a sound booth to create the clicking of a horse’s hooves, even when the animal was walking on dirt or grass, or the sharp, excessive metallic sound of a tv sword being drawn from its sheath.
And, of course, the laugh track, which grew to annoy viewers; yet when it was removed, they complained that their viewing pleasure was diminished by its absence.
What mid-century television viewers might have liked, and perhaps what social media users respond to now, is exaggeration: a not-entirely representational, slightly enhanced version of the lives they recognize. This concept can be applied to animal behavior, too.
Baby seagulls ask their mothers for feed by tapping their beaks against a red stripe that runs down the center of hers. When scientists present yellow popsicle sticks to the nest, painted with a red stripe, the birds peck at it just as they would their mothers.
But when they’re offered sticks painted with three stripes, the baby birds run over each other, frantic to ge closer to the stick, pecking maniacally. They ignore the single stripe, and even their real mothers, in favor of the hyperbolic impersonation.
Outcries over the ways in which the digital age distorts relationships to reality may be warranted, but perhaps this distortion has become so possible because we animals have preferred it all along.
If we no longer feel tethered to the communities our species was molded into needing, the act of posting a selfie or a carefully edited portrait of our banal domestic lives could just be a muted form of personal rescure.
Is display a form of dilution or is the broadcast part of what makes it real?