The End of “with Jon Stewart”

I have only fuzzy memories of the late nineties, but I can clearly remember finding out way back in 1999 that Jon Stewart was taking over for Craig Kilborn, and actually thinking…this guy’ll never be able to replace Craig. And he didn’t. Instead, he reinvented The Daily Show as many of us have known it for the last sixteen years: a pop-culture platform for reframing in humor what many of us experienced as the––insert your own hyperbolic adjective here––of coming to adulthood against the backdrop of the Bush years, 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the economic meltdown of 2008. For me, The Daily Show, and later The Colbert Report, operated as cathartic performance art that challenged traditional notions of the real/fake binary.

Family Watching TVWhen I was growing up, traditional news programs were a staple in my family. I have clear synesthetic memories of the smell of breakfast cooking as my Dad got ready for work, my brother and I in pajamas, the family conversation overlaying the familiar babble of the local news station as it played in background. As a child, I remember trusting those talking heads because they seemed so official, so possessed of “capital T” Truth.

After the clusterf*ck that was the 2000 election (the first I was old enough to vote in), I found myself increasingly kerfuffled every time I tuned in to traditional news outlets. The Daily Show represented a way to stay connected to current political information without disintegrating into a puddle of panic. As time marched on, and the aggravation of the 2000 election was overshadowed by the horror of 9/11 and the ensuing madness of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Stewart’s, and later Colbert’s, humor transmuted the shock and sorrow of those difficult years. I found myself trusting The Daily Show in a way that I could no longer trust other sources of news, and I was not alone. Many of my friends had turned away from traditional news outlets, preferring to get their information from the Internet, each other, and Comedy Central.

The trust that my generation has placed in Stewart and Colbert has evoked nervousness and ire from both sides of the political spectrum. And while it’s easy to accuse The Daily Show and The Colbert Report of diffusing activist outrage and fizzling real feelings of political discontent, I have to (sheepishly) admit that the majority of my “outrage” tends to manifest as paralyzing terror. So, while perhaps some people’s political momentum was arrested, The Daily Show and Colbert Report kept me in the world, kept me in the pipeline of information, and forced me to laugh at the insanity instead of hide from it. Is this the most effective strategy for political change? Probably not. Has it kept me involved in a certain way, yeah.

In their Salon article “The day Jon Stewart quit: Why ‘The Daily Show‘ isn’t the satire America needs,” Jamie Kilstein and Allison Kilkenny come down hard on Stewart and Colbert’s 2010 “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” which brought together folks who “don’t like shouting” for a spectacle of “reasonableness.”  I saw the rally as a type of performance art designed to draw attention to the all-too-invisible subjectivity at work in the red/blue binary. Kilstein and Kilkenny completely miss this point, instead adhering adamantly to the binary, stating that the “division’ [Stewart] dismisses is literally the only fight that matters.” If the division between red and blue is all that matters, then each of us becomes subject to the binary-driven political narrative, created in its image. Rather than simply satire, or a rejection of activism, the rally strove to disrupt the seeming solidness of a system that gives two pre-defined options and calls it a “choice.”

It’s too easy to pick apart these shows, to blast them for what they did or didn’t do politically. Or to compare them to more politically subversive comedians from the past. But The Daily Show and Colbert Report have done more than just amuse and distract, they’ve drawn attention to the absurdity of the political and media simulacra that’s been right in front of our faces all along. Like Magritte’s “Treachery of Images” forces the issue of representation vs. reality, just raising the “is it a ‘fake’ or is it a ‘real” news program question makes visible that all politics and media are a construction (and, if you want to go down a rabbit hole, that all reality is itself a construction).

The Treachery of Images by Magritte

Ceci n'est pas une News Program.
Ceci n’est pas une News Program.

If anything, complicating the real/fake binary provides a productive space for challenging established structures. By replicating and adapting the genre conventions of the “trusted” News program, and remixing it with absurdism, humor, and cartharsis, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are neither real nor fake, neither humor nor news, but something that calls attention to the power of both.

As a rhetorical appeal, humor can be seen as a form of pathos, an emotional appeal. Make someone laugh, and they’re more likely to like you, and therefore more likely to be persuaded by you. But that’s too simplistic a notion for the role that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have played in many of our lives. Rather, it seems that their humor was enacting an alchemical process of transmutation; as we sat with our sorrow, frustration, and anger, horrified by the unfolding of events that we felt little power to halt or effect, humor cathartically transmuted those feelings, providing instead a way to feel interconnected, and, through the process of posing the question: is it real or fake? granted us agency through awareness of the simulacra.

Though it may have couched itself as a “fake” news show, The Daily Show has provided a very real space for transmuting a generation’s frustration, anger, and disappointment. Where we have felt disenfranchised in many areas of our lives, the sheer force of Stewart and Colbert’s ability to get folks to act en masse has been vicariously thrilling during times when a lot of people have felt unheard. Stewart and Colbert have shown us that smart and geeky can be powerful, that wit can win, that the pen is mightier than the sword. Or at least, reminded us of these things for an hour a day, four days a week.

 

Forcebook, the Jedi, and May the #kairos be with you



If you don’t not think too deeply about being unshallow, it’ opaquely clear. And as long as you follow Jedi recommendations to “Feel. Don’t think,” you won’t force this idea beyond transparency: Star Wars’ Force is a form of social media.

Here are a few reasons to imagine the Force as Forcebook.forcebook

  1. The Force is made up of midichlorians, which are basically Wi-Fi connections. The more midichlorians you have, the more bars or the better access you have to feel the Force.
  2. The Force has a search engine. You just have to tap into the midichlorians and “search your feelings.”
  3. The Force is a network of information.
  4. The Force can allow you to predict the future. It’s sort of tells you if clickbait or triggers are working through midichlorian analytics.

And I like imagining the Force as social media. Using the Force as a trope helps me appreciate the cool of digital social media. It helps me see some of the ways the Force really sucks.

  1. Yoda the Hutt
    To use the Force, ya gotta be part of an elite club.  You either have midiclorians or you don’t. Unlike with digital social media, you can’t really join the Jedi club through research and practice unless you’ve got midichlorians. There is NO such thing as Screen Shot 2014-06-30 at 10.50.14 AM
    midichlorian toothpaste for helping strengthen your Force.  Access to digital media is certainly an issue for a lot of people but tapping into the Interweb is much more accessible than being one or talking to one of the, like, thirty Jedi able to use the force and protect the galaxy.
  1. Force Bubble
    The Jedi only use one search engine – the Force.  Jedi Pariser makes a good point about digital media filter bubbles and how search engines are algorhetorical (algorithmic rhetoric) engines mediating the information we see and how users become shielded from alternative perspectives on issues: search engines game the information you see by providing results that reinforce your ideology or way of thinking rather than complicating and questioning it.  Or you may just get results for some businesses and not others – Dark Side/Sith businesses rather than Jedi run establishments. The Force, though, is even worse. It is THE only search engine in the Galaxy. There is no Duck Duck Go or Bing or even Alta Vista, which is Yahoo!. It is as if there is just Google.  There is only one bubble. And Jedi can’t even agree that they are feeling or seeing the same thing. Yoda might see something Obi-Wan doesn’t. And while it could be argued that such differences in Force use offer different or alternative perspectives, the perspectives are based on access to information. In other words, both Yoda and Obi-Wan can’t “read” the same tanner-binks“article” of the Force and compare notes or discuss the situation more completely.  At least, I could say, “Yo,Yoda, Obi-Wan. Check out this article from Harlot about how Jar Jar Binks and Stephanie Tanner are similar. It argues that this might be a reason Jar Jar was so hated by fans.  You know, because we were tired of Full House. Thoughts?”
  1. #kairos
    The Force doesn’t even let users participate very easily in a #kairos economy: that change or the difference between that regular old kairos that the Jedi utilize and what we use in social media. #kairos happens when you are always connected to your midichlorians or are always on the web when you carry your smartphone. It is the omnipresent and omnispace – it’s the always on possibility of being able to have that agency for a propitious moment in a propitious digital space.But propitiousness can’t happen as easily with one network to tap into. The Jedi just don’t have a very good network for #kairos. Jedi Rheingold Screen Shot 2014-06-30 at 10.50.52 AMhelps explains #kairos’ importance: “”In previous eras, it may have been true that ‘it’s not what you know but who you know.’ Today, how you know who you know matters as much as who you know, and one of the most valuable traits a person could have in a twenty-first-century organization is a knack for knowing ‘who knows who knows what’” (From @hrheingold‘s Netsmart 24). And to amend and add to his explanation, there is also a knack for knowing when to know when to know what and where to know where to know what. I hope here and now and know is a where to know what to know when to know what.I just Dr. Seussed or Yoda, did I? At any rate, the flows of information along numerous networks are opportunities for users to create value (informational, social, and emotional) in just right spaces and just right times.  The Force limited these opportunities because of its limitations. Jedi had Forcebook.  They didn’t have Twitter, Reddit, Pinterest, YouTube, or Yahoo! Pipes.

In more, other, and our words, Jedi, it’s time to “Think. Don’t feel.” Forget the Force. May the #kairos be with you.

This is an excerpt from an article I’m writing with @CateBlouke.