TRADITION AND TECHNOLOGY
IN LOCAL NEWSCASTS:
The Social Psychology of Form

Bruce E. Gronbeck

One of the most interesting discussions in Kenneth Burke's Counter-Statement (1931) concerns the psychology of information and the psychology of form. To Burke, the scientific and psychoanalytic perspectives on the world in the 1920s had misdirected much reading of literature by putting a premium on subject-oriented information rather than audience-oriented form. Critics, thought Burke, too often approached literature as a laboratory in which to study human life or to psychoanalyze the age. Such purposes even "led the artist . . . to lay his emphasis on the giving of information--with the result," said Burke (1931, p. 32), "that art tends more and more to substitute the psychology of the hero (the subject) for the psychology of the audience." The emphasis on subject matter, he suggested, draws our attention away from the audience's experiences that are engaged in the reading process and even amalgamated into the interpretive process. "Truth in art," Burke argued (1931, p. 31), "is not the discovery of facts, not an addition to human knowledge in the scientific sense of the word. It is, rather, the exercise of human propriety, the formulation of symbols."

With his usual circumflex prose style, Burke did not get much more clear than this. Yet, his attempt to describe how it is that meaning-making is grounded in the form rather than the content of literature is significant. Burke was not merely repeating traditional pieties on the separation of form and content. Because he (1931, p. 31) defined form as "the creation of an appetite in the mind of the auditor, and the adequate satisfying of that appetite," he rather was redefining meaning: meaning is not to be understood as information contained in texts but rather as kinds of understanding that are possible because of what audiences bring to those texts.

To Burke, the individualized datum, the fact, is made significant to human beings and hence capable of being shared only when cast into social frameworks that people can bring to their encounter with that datum. To the Burke of Counter-Statement, those frameworks are the sources of what he called "eloquence," in that they permit meaning to transcend the word-by-word text of literature. Two-thirds of a century ago, Burke was on to something very important.

Perhaps the best test of the utility of Burke's thoughts is in the study of news. News is, presumably, important public information. That which is "newsworthy," most of us assume, is information gathered from our local, national, and international environments and presented to us in written, verbal, and visual forms: as newspaper stories with accompanying pictures, as radio programs filled with oral speech and background sound, as television reports etched in speech and video segments. Surely in the presentation of news we have texts, paralleling the "literature" Burke studied, that permit us to explore and even extend his thinking on the psychology of information and form.

We need to begin by considering what kind of information news is. I suggest that news is relevant, formalized, public information.

1. Relevant information has social-institutional implications. That which is relevant has been constructed and structured so as to be linked to the lives of the people to whom it is presented. Unless some datum can be linked to my country, region, government, bank, church, family, health and well-being, or livelihood, I will probably care little about it.
2. Formalized information has been structured and unitized in some socially understandable way. Most news is structured narratively, as stories about people doing something to some effect, that is, as a coherent series of events with beginnings, middles, and endings enacted by particular people with specific purposes. News also, however, can be structured as an announcement (a recitation of coherent facts about some present or future event), a conversation (two or more voices related to each other topically or attitudinally), or an anecdote (a humorous, heartwarming, or angering story about someone's trials or triumphs in life). And we can distinguish, along with Shanto Iyengar (1991), episodic from thematic news stories, that is, those stories that report concrete events in terms of particular people and events versus those that offer more abstract background on or generalized (thematic) views of those events.
3. Public information is made up of data that are worthy of communal sharing. Even a newscast's final anecdote, which often seems like trivial information, can be thought about as important public information. That story about a feisty grandmother who wards off burglars with a broom or a farmer who runs his tractor on chicken manure has a social dimension; at the least, it is a bonding device that demonstrates the human aspirations and foibles that many of us share. Certainly most news stories--70-85 percent of which involve governmental-institutional actors (Gans 1979)--are clearly narratives of general, shared, institutional interest, celebrating the accomplishments of cultural heroes or warning us of the dangerous actions of villains.

If we accept the general proposition that news is relevant, formalized, public information--information valued for its timeliness, uniqueness, and sensitivity to controversy (Schwoch, White, and Reilly 1992)--then of course its form, as Burke understood that idea, is crucial to the ways we comprehend that information, for formalization is essential to the very definition of news. News is never comprised of random or isolated data but always put into forms that give it social relevance and justify its publicness.

But Burke's definition of form as the arousal and fulfillment of appetite does not help us much in understanding the formative process itself. How does "form"--the social psychology of form, more precisely--turn data into relevant, public information?

That question leads to others, especially as we focus particularly on televised news. How do news organizations go about the business of presenting "the news" and how does the news work persuasively? Such queries should drive us to probe the psychology of form understood rhetorically, as Burke suggested, albeit in somewhat different ways than he did. To begin to answer the questions, we will examine local news, for it easier to discuss news-audience relationships (that is, the rhetorical dynamics of newscasting) with local than with national news. We will examine an exceedingly small data set: two broadcasts (March 23-24, 1993) of the 10 p.m. news from a middle-market, middle-America television news operation at KCRG-TV in Waterloo-Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

I will argue that what Burke calls the psychology of form is schizophrenic and socially anchored: two social psychologies of form are operative in televised news, and they compete with each other. The tension existing between the social psychology of technological form and the social psychology of conventionalized form produces two forces of persuasion in local news: one separates us from our comfortable lived experiences and the other envelopes us in shared community. The significance of this tension between newness and oldness, change and permanence, will be explored in the concluding section of this essay.

THE COMPETING PRESENTATIONAL FORMS IN LOCAL NEWS

In exploring competing forms for the public information called news, we are examining what are often referred to as frames for information. Frames are the perspectives from which we are presented or asked to understand information. Framing is a sociocognitive process whereby some viewpoint is taken, in Burke's language ([1945, 1950] 1954), to be the "container," and some object is taken to be the "thing contained." And of course, what is asserted to be the container for what containments can be of determinative importance. As Iyengar (1991, p. 11) puts it, "the manner in which a problem of choice is 'framed' is a contextual cue that may profoundly influence decision outcomes." In the words of P. K. Manning (1996, p. 266), "television links real activities with produced imagery to mark the political." Our frames are in part individualized, cobbled together out of our personal experiences in the world. More interestingly and more importantly, however, our frames for viewing sensate environments are social and institutional, and even political, given to us by institutions and learned both formally and informally; in so many ways, you have been told by parents, church, government, peer groups, and television programs what to look at and how to see, understand, or act on it.

"Social situations," in Joshua Meyrowitz's (1985, p. 23) words, "form the hidden ground for our figures of speech and action." That is, social situations and our experiences in them are the containers, the points-from-where-we-look, when we encounter strange or unknown ideas or experiences. Those containers are never neutral shells or merely places from which we comprehend the world; given their social origin, they come with habituated ways of understanding and evaluating occurrences. They include what Michael Parenti (1993, p. 23) calls "opinion visibility"--"perceptual limits around which our opinions take shape." Social-institutional frames, therefore, are perspectives with attitudes and, as Manning (1996) notes, with feelings. And so, when television news frames information, forms it in ways to make it comprehensible, it casts the news makers and the news viewers into particular social roles.

News as Items of Communal Interest

Consider first the opening--the presumably most newsworthy--stories from the KCRG-TV 10 p.m. newscast. The lead story on Tuesday, March 23, 1993, concerned the danger of flooding in Cedar Rapids. With a "LIVE" logo and a digital clock in the upper lefthand corner assuring us that we were witnessing news as it happened, reporter Alicia Richards was on the scene at the Cedar River, "preparing for the meltdown"--a word of unease and ambiguity, given the nearby Payloe nuclear plant. It was dark, but we were treated to live shots of the high water and, from another location, footage of city workers filling sandbags. We were told that citizens could get fifteen sandbags free and then saw videotape from earlier in the day, when Pam Harris had been interviewed. She had been flooded out six weeks earlier and was sandbagging her property this time around. Alicia Richards assured us, "The best thing to do is be prepared," and "Being ready really helps--that was Pam's trouble last time." This story was presented twelve days before the Cedar River actually crested above floodstage (for the first of many times in the spring and summer of the great Midwest floods of 1993). It thus was a community service story and, oddly, a lead story. That is, the news department decided that the most newsworthy information of the day related to preparing the citizenry for rampaging nature.

The community theme continued in the next two stories that evening, both trials. The second story began, "A Linn County jury has decided that Joseph Hughes Jr. will spend the rest of his life in prision," opening a story on a first-degree murder conviction. The third story opened similarly: "The fate of a Norwalk, Iowa, woman accused of killing her infant son will soon be in the hands of the jury." Both stories were thus framed as events wherein citizens were enforcing community standards; both stories were framed as jury actions, not criminal actions.

Wednesday evening again opened with Alicia Richards on the road "LIVE"--this time, at an Alburnett, Iowa, high school that had been robbed. The story was about the twenty-three rural schools burglarized over the previous eight weeks. Precisely why Richards was live in Alburnett was unclear, as the previous evening's burglaries occurred in other communities, two of which had been featured in earlier newscasts that day. Perhaps Alburnett's proximity to Cedar Rapids made it the easier site for a live report that evening.

Whatever the rationale for putting Richards in Alburnett, she reprised her pattern of the previous night, giving us good advice about being prepared and, this evening, assuring her viewers that she would "continue to look in on this situation." She exuded the same confidence that Sheriff Popenhagen did when he guaranteed on camera that the burglars would be caught "in a matter of time," especially if citizens would be on the lookout for suspicious vehicles around their communities' schools.

These lead stories from mid-week March 1993 are interesting not only because they frame newsworthy information in social-institutional ways but also because they reinforce or reaffirm particular values--and therein lies their essential rhetorical edge. That is, these stories all had communitarian force. The Cedar Rapids Department of Streets and Channel 9 were keeping citizens safe from natural disaster; the Sheriff's Department in cooperation with Channel 9 was making the school break-ins a top priority so as to protect the youth of eastern Iowa. Pam Harris was a repentant citizen who knew enough to prepare for the second onslaught by the river, and citizen-juries saw that justice was served and the public was protected from evildoers. These stories provided valuative orientations that clearly suggested what aspects of news items were to be assessed positively and what, negatively. Personal and civic responsibility were combining to save Cedar Rapids from the swollen river, juries were judging fairly (one person guilty and another, innocent, as we found out the next night), and conscientious law enforcement together with citizen vigilance (watching for the all-important license plate numbers of suspicious vehicles) offered viewers values worth admiring and emulating. Even as viewers were given information within particular social frames, those frames were themselves legitimated by their very use in the information-giving processes employed by KCRG-TV, itself a well-known and significant community institution.

Such tendencies toward social-institutional and even communitarian orientations were visible in different but equally powerful ways in the other half of the 10 p.m. news in middle America. Of the twenty-one or so minutes of actual news time, only ten or eleven minutes are devoted to what we usually think of as "news." The rest of the local newscast is occupied with weather and sports in almost equal proportion. While weather forecasts undoubtedly help farmers and golfers decide on next-day activities and while local sports help mollify the citizens of school districts who grumble about the high cost of K-12 education, weather and sports segments do more than that rhetorically. They, too, are powerfully communitarian in their force. In both segments, we consistently find a roll call of community interests. In reeling off basketball or wrestling scores, sportscasters identify discursively the towns of the viewing area, circumscribing the viewing area as a social place--here, "eastern Iowa," which was labeled as such and is comprised of a series of locales that regularly have their names mentioned.

The weather forecaster went even farther. Denny Frary of KCRG-TV not only mentioned and showed on a map the communities of eastern Iowa, but even named particular people who were KCRG-TV's "weather spotters." On March 23, 1993, Frary did an eleven-segment spot for his main four-minute appearance as follows:

1. Weather video of a rural mail carrier driving through snow and mud as a community servant living out the cliche of "neither snow nor ice . . .";
2. A look at the temperatures in the main cities of eastern Iowa;
3. Looks at Iowa City, Cedar Rapids, Waterloo, and Dubuque through a high-tower camera ("the Hawkeye"), showing the viewers exactly what those places looked like "live";
4. An "almanac" review of the highs and lows around eastern Iowa, including mentions of some of Frary's weather spotters: Bob Steika in Iowa City, Gene Kuhl in Prairiesburg, Sidney Hibsion in Bellevue, "Mrs. Eckhardt in Waukon, back from vacation," Boyd Larew in Manchester, and Bud Steich in Sigourney;
5. Some computer graphics with more Iowa temperatures;
6. A national weather map with temperatures from around the country;
7. Satellite time-lapse photos of moving clouds over an animated map;
8. A colorized shot of national radar;
9. The close-up computer map of the southeastern United States, showing moving clouds;
10. A jump cut to a close-up computerized map of the central United States, with clouds moving across Iowa;
11. And, finally, a five-day weather forecast, followed by Frary returning to the anchor desk.

Notice that segment 1 celebrated the commitment of a public servant; segment 2 offered the first roundup of viewing-area communities by name; segment 3 featured the four main cities of the viewing area through the "Hawkeye" camera, a piece of technology humanized with the nickname of the state. Personification, whereby communities are materialized through references to some of their actual citizens, induced a sense of community via geographical representatives in the by-now communal process of weather-watching in segment 4. Segments 5-9 presented a dazzling technological display under the seeming control of weather wizard Frary--weatherman as shaman. Segment 10 united the geographical with the technological, as the communal lands were framed in iconic representations of their weather. And segment 11 added the dimension of time to the already present dimension of space, thus fully situating the people of eastern Iowa in the two positional orientations to life (Hall 1959).

Local weather is a virtuoso televisual performance by old pros like Denny Frary, full of wisdom and lore about weather patterns coupled with what undoubtedly are the most expensive graphics the station puts out. Through technological framing, geographical roll calling, and temporal progress from past (today's weather) to present (current conditions) to future (the forecast), the weather person works communal magic, not only scientistically predicting the weather but also articulating the lived conditions of a people. The sportscaster does much the same things; the graphics are different--a few video clips and scores on the character generator--but dominating, and the roll calls, especially during reports of end-of-the-week sporting contests in eastern Iowa high schools, are community-building discourses.

In these ways, the sports and weather segments of the 10 p.m. news in middle America spatially construct the viewing area as a bounded community that shares symbolic relationships through the roll calls of towns. In sum, the information offered during local newscasts is framed socially, institutionally, and communally. Interpretive frames are provided so that information becomes relevant in particular ways; roll calls permit sports and weather segments--fully half of the 10 p.m. show--to construct the geographical-symbolic boundaries around those institutions and communities.

News as Technologically Innovative

Before we wax too romantic about the prairie ideology re-presented nightly in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, however, let us examine the technological framing a bit more closely. With technological innovations such as ENG (electronic news gathering via minicams and microwave transmissions), satellite relays (delivery of voice and pictures via uplinks, downlinks, and satellite transponders), color radar (mapping of atmospheric conditions locally and nationally, time-lapse satellite weather photos, and a feeling of three-dimensional pictures of clouds), and other color graphics (e.g., computerized graphic reproductions of such events as the bombing of sites in the Gulf War of 1991, unfolding economic graphs, computer-enhanced pictures), electronic forms also organize information in signficant ways. No longer is news a matter of putting a radio newscast on television; no longer does news consist of talking heads. Over the last twenty years, three innovations in particular are of special importance:

1. The visual has taken on increasing importance among the communication channels. There is more to see. Stories are written to emphasize the visual. Especially with international news, the stories must follow the pictures because there often are no other depictions available; notice how often you see "ITN" (International Television News, a British video service) on the corner of international stories--a sign that the station has accepted video from a distributer of pictures and then fit the story to those pictures. The visual has become the dominant sense in the Western world (Levin 1993; Jenks 1995). Television's ability to deliver and even enhance the visual has not gone unnoticed among news departments.

2. "Live" and "action" news formats, featuring live reports in real time from some scene, are presented primarily because they convey a sense of the vital and the anxious as they are present in lived experience. They add excitement and dynamism to local news. In addition, of course, if a station has purchased a truck and microwave transmitter, the technology must be used if the investment is to pay for itself.

3. Improvements in electronic animation have given stations new specialities. Not only are the show openings and closings much more pleasing because of animation, but better visuals are constructed: moving line graphs, rotating objects, time-lapse segments, mixtures of black-and-white and color, figures inserted from one setting into another, colorization and recolorization, removal of unwanted images from pictures. The computerized animation technology can remake brute reality or reframe it in consciously aesthetic or even ideological ways.

Overall, then, televised local news is visually focused, temporally oriented to the present, and susceptible to electronic elaboration or reformation. Technological form differs in signficant ways from social or conventional form.

Furthermore, the social psychology of technological forms makes certain sorts of data or information more newsworthy than other kinds. The hi-tech world is here and now, and hi-tech arena of television news is also visual-aural. Stories with visual attractiveness and action and with commanding sound, those with a sense of nowness rather than thenness, and those that use the wonder-working technologies (computerized animation, moving graphics, multiple-location interactions) are more likely to be seen than stories that are simply read by the folks at the anchor desk. Stories that visualize agony (Bosnian massacres, dragging the Cedar River for bodies), forbidden pleasure (wet T-shirt contests, raids on houses of prostitution), and children (the search for "Campbell Soup Kids" shown on KCRG-TV on March 24) are more likely to be broadcast than a serious discussion of health care costs or the economy. Yesterday's hero drops out of the lineup in favor of today's new discovery. And a story such as the one on rural high school break-ins, where the reporter can interact as a professional with the newsmaker, will get on whether or not it has much genuine community urgency and interest.

The point here is simple: the technological formalisms often exist in dialectical tension with the sociocultural formalisms. The visual-presentist aesthetics of technologically shaped information is largely decontextualized, often desocialized; and it certainly is defamiliarizing because of its unnaturalness, its very unreality. News technology may even sever or at least deemphasize sociality and lived experience. Verbalized stories recall past experience, while computerized animations re-present them; the technological formalisms stress the visualizable present, while the social formalisms put a premium on the verbalized and recollected past. The lure of specularized here and now, with its aesthetic and ideological pleasures, serves as a temptation for viewers to think less (or not at all) about the verbally evoked past of social truths and commitments. The technological spectacle is a form that can compete with the framing doxa or generally received (doxastic) opinions of the collectivity.

Within recent memory, the news coverage from Baghdad during the Gulf War shellings is an excellent example of these ideas. We learned much about the reporters' lives in hotels without anemities and about tracer shells making patterns in the eerie green-tint video on which the night sky was captured but little about the lives of city dwellers subjected to the bombardment. Even when covering American warriors, reporters spent more time on military hardware than on the human side of soldiering. My favorite local story during the Gulf War came from another Waterloo-Cedar Rapids station, KWWL-TV, which ran a four-minute story on January 21, 1991, on the technology involved in getting reports from Saudi Arabia to Iowa; that technology was depicted as heroically as the sons and daughters of the Heartland stationed there. The technology was often the news in the Gulf War. Televised news's favoring of the interesting visual, the larger-than-life technology and the Nintendo-like war waged with "smart bombs" and Scuds rather than human bodies demonstrate various ways in which the very defamiliarized (and hence interesting), technologically enhanced aspects of life and the familiar (and hence less interesting), socially sanctioned dimensions of living can do battle to frame viewers' understandings and interpretations of the world.

SECONDARY ORALITY AS AN EPISTEMOLOGICAL BATTLEGROUND

We now have ventured into territory that belongs to what Walter Ong (1982) calls "secondary orality." Because television allows us to share common experiences in ways analogous to how they are distributed in preliterate societies, Ong believes that contemporary society is strongly oral in its orientation. In his words (1982, p. 136), "this new orality has striking resemblances to the old in its participatory mystique, its fostering of a communal sense, its concentration on the present moment, and even its use of formulas." Yet, because the literate age followed the oral age and because electronic technologies have intruded forcibly into our lives, that orality is "secondary"--marked and redirected by both literacy and technological apparatuses.

In positing a dualistic social psychology that can be seen in contrasts between socially and technologically formative forces, we may have yet another way to talk about secondary orality in contemporary life. If technological forms are not simply facilitators of sociality--that is, conduits connecting people--but competitors with more traditional oral mechanisms for social connection, then we may have found an important way of reanalyzing current worries over mass media and mass society. Critics who dislike and distrust the mass media may have missed some important facets of the contests over human understanding being waged in our time.

Media-bashing is a popular sport these days. Some attacks follow in the crumudgeonly footsteps of Neil Postman, whose book Technopoly (1992) is subtitled The Surrender of Culture to Technology. He does not appreciate living in a society dominated by various technologies and their reformation of life experiences: medicine focused on machines rather than the laying-on of hands, omnipresent computers and computerese, technologically driven ideologies (the politics of the possible), and an overarching scientism that flows from such thinking. All such manifestations of a technological mind-set Postman views as anti-individualistic and antilibertarian; his solutions to such problems feature a kind of liberal arts education treating the valuative and ethical complexities of what it means to be a human being. Normative criticism is the only way to hold back the craven New World.

Other attacks follow the more self-centered concerns of the French social critic Jacques Ellul. His The Humiliation of the Word (1985) is a more theologically and philosophically oriented treatise on the destruction of the interior life, of subjectivity. In the word, he says (p. 23), we find "discussion, paradox, and mystery." In such processes dwell insight and the secrets of human life, which are eliminated by technology and scientism. We live in societies, argued Ellul in 1973, dominated by la technique: a technological environment that desacralizes and deindividuates human beings.

Perhaps the strongest attack on electronic media has come from the French poststructuralists, most notably Jean Baudrillard (e.g., 1983; 1988). He argues that we are not surrounded simply by deceptive signs (vehicles for mistaken meaning) but in fact empty signs--a mass-mediated language and package of icons that mean nothing. We live in a technologically driven simulacrum, a world of seemingness, a world of ecstasy without joy, of mass appeal without cultural effect on individuals. To another of the postmoderns, Guy Debord (1990), material social relations, exemplified in the idea of being able to actually touch others, have been replaced by visualized ones. Such conceptions of simulacra, which of course can be traced back to Plato's Allegory of the Cave, of life shadows and appearances as mistaken for reality, have been much written about since World War II; Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's critique of mass culture in the late 1940s as well as Dwight Macdonald's essays on mass culture and alienation in the 1950s belong to the tradition now being featured in postmodernist thought (Aronowitz 1993, p. 79). As Gilles Deleuze (1990) summarizes these views, thanks to technology everything we experience is a copy of a copy.

What are we to make of such assaults on technology, the (presumably) resulting changes in social structures, and even the cultural redefinitions that appear to flow from technological innovation, particularly in public communication? While it is undoubtedly true that the new technologies have altered social processes in determinative ways, must we wring our hands in despair over cultural surrender, humiliation, and simulation as do Postman, Ellul, and Baudrillard? I think not.

All of the critics of electronically mediated communication media that I have mentioned have different arguments but one assumption in common: they assume that the electronic media have brought cataclysmic changes in communication, culture, and consciousness. Postman (esp. 1985) assumes that television destroys the rational bases of public deliberation and our sense of social obligations. Ellul (along with Postman) assumes that literate language--and hence controlled, discursive inquiry--are humiliated and hence human beings lose both their ability to consider social change reasonably and their sense of self-sufficiency, that is, their capability for independent cognitive activity. And, Baudrillard (1988, p. 40) alleges that media technology creates desires to consume rather than to make goods, hence making social relations into economic encounters and refashioning individuals into "a multitude of identical minaturized egos." Such arguments for new modes of communication, culture, and consciousness simply must be premised on the cataclysmic change thesis to be rational.

The assumption of the cataclysmic change thesis, however, is easily challenged. As Ong noted, the electronic media seemingly recoup traditional experiences that characterized oral societies thousands of years ago by recovering a sense of oral connection through broadcast talk, by allowing large segments of wired cultures such as that of the United States to share experiences simultaneously, and by creating a sense of face-to-face copresence, which makes ethos or character so important to televised discourses.

Those aspects of KCRG-TV news that we examined provide compelling evidence for Ong's analyses of secondary orality. The social forms of the stories we reviewed--the arousal and satisfaction of social expectations, in Burke's terms--were traditional forms wherein community interests and values framed new information presented in the lead and follow-up stories from those evenings in March 1993. Alicia Richards, the anchors, Denny Frary--these human beings had a kind of presence, even a sense of character (ethos), in their televised presentations; they used the first-person singular to manifest and work from their professional personae. Their presentations combined professionalized credibility based on their training and expertise with their sensitivities to the collective bases of popular knowledge--references to Pam Harris's learning from experience, to juries of peers making determinations of guilt or innocence, to the weather spotters who could materialize various communities' existence and climatological activities.

Of course, the social connections between the citizens of eastern Iowa were fabricated electronically those mid-week nights in March 1993. Thomas Patterson and Richard McClure (1976, p. 90) offer us more than a grain of truth when they argue that "since the nightly news is too brief to treat fully the complexity of modern politics, too visual to present effectively most events, and too entertainment-minded to tell viewers much worth knowing, most network [and local?] newscasts are neither very educational nor very powerful communicators." Yet, in a sense, such views are based on what Burke long ago identified as a psychology of information or what Emmanuel Lazega (1992) called the technical conception of information control. The psychology of social form, however, reconceptualizes our understanding of the kind of information we get from the 10 p.m. news. "Messages need legitimation," as Lazega (1992, p. 31) suggests, "to be considered as informative," and that is a truism borne out by our look at the KCRG-TV news.

The electronic fabrication of the temporal and spatial dimensions of social relationships, however, was also visible in those newscasts. Viewers of theMarch 23, 1993, evening news program found themselves immediately in three places at once: at home, at the KCRG-TV studios in Waterloo, Iowa, and on location with Alicia Richards along the Cedar River in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Being in three different places at once electronically, viewers were active simultaneously in three different social relationships: in (presumably) familial and familiar relationships at home, in parasocial relationships (Horton and Wohl 1986) with news anchors and a weather forecaster they had come to feel they knew personally over the years, and in institutional relationships with expert news gathers or truth-finders, such as Alicia Richards. Richards's live reports were presented to the anchors, who in turn positively sanctioned them and passed them on to viewers. Three sorts of relationships with three types of people in three different locations could not be assembled without technology. They are the products of what Baudrillard (1988, p. 17) calls "electronic encephalization."

If the televisual technology can remake space, it can also rescore our sense of time. "File footage" (videotape of past events) can be made a part of now, as it was in the story about high school break-ins. The past is thus retextualized into the present. Time-lapse photography of the kind Frary used to show us twenty-four hours of cloud movements in a matter of microseconds telescopes time, elongating the present by pulling both past (yesterday's satellite photos) and future (tomorrow's predicted air flow) into our sense of nowness. Thanks especially to its visuality and its ability to manipulate the "realisticness" (Fiske 1987) of its icons and images, televised news can create a sense of an enduring present, an unfolding here and now that represents nothing less than a remanufacture of cultural orientation, that is, our understanding of our position in time and space.

Thus we have come to expect both social form (tradition) and electronic form (technology) to energize our lives every evening at 10 p.m. in middle America via a discursive structure--live reports, other news stories, weather, sports, sign-off anecdote--that is created through repeated use and that is productive of a sense of collective well-being. Eastern Iowans can go to bed in a quiescent state, assured that they have surveyed the socially important events of the day, packaged in collectively sanctioned frameworks, and have been treated to a technological display of retooled time and space that defamiliarizes the environment enough to create kinds of information impossible to make present to them in any other way.

So the virtues of past social relations so mourned by Postman, Ellul, and the French poststructuralists have not been lost but are rather maintained even as they are reconstructed. In the era of secondary orality, we come to know our world and its boundaries through an amalgamation of two social psychologies of form that bond tradition with innovation, the familiar with the defamiliarized, the heard and the seen--the gnosis that is traditional (historically specific) knowledge with the episteme that is demonstrated (decontextualized) knowledge.

PARTING THOUGHTS

In 1931, Kenneth Burke (p. 31) was worried about "the disorders of the social system," even the "disorders of culture and taste" that would follow in the wake of too tight a focus on information and too little attention to doxastic processes for bringing collectively valued and socially integrative frames of analysis to bear on literature. Burke saw information as the enemy of literature--of the examined life, of the eloquent aesthetic experience that in its transcendence could help us understand lived experience. To him, information was the enemy not because having factual or scientific knowledge was bad but because such information was a special kind of knowledge: a knowledge of things without their contexts, without a sense of the social weighting and of the signficance of its import.

Information, in this sense, was what resulted from the Enlightenment revolution, when truth and ideas were thought of not in human terms (the doxastic way) but in reportive terms (the scientistic way): "This great Source, of most of the Ideas we have," averred John Locke ([1700] 1975, p. 105), "depending wholly upon our Senses, and derived by them to the Understanding, I call SENSATIONS." To Locke, ideas were the mind's reports from the human being's sensory equipment of what the outside world was like, and they could be checked and rechecked for accuracy by repeated observations. But to Burke, if that's all ideas were, then disorder or even anarchy was all we could expect to see in collectivities, for there would be no way of bonding one person's ideas (sensory experiences) with another's. We might be able to share information per se with each other but, without social-valuative frames in common, we could not understand its force in our collective lives. Thus, Burke distinguished between the psychology of information and the psychology of form, denigrating the one mind-set and celebrating the other.

In this brief look at a small selection of local newscasts in the Midwest, I hope I have both made good use of Burke's musings and yet extended them in useful ways. In kinds of public communication that include not only the verbiage of literature but also the visual and acoustic codes of television signals, the information/form distinction is important, though in a different manner than Burke suggested. While the social psychologies of information and of form exist in tension to each other--as traditional stability in understandings do to innovative, technologically driven destabilizations--I suggest that we not think of them in disjunctive terms. Either/or ways of thinking can be destructive; such thinking has led scholars such as Postman, Ellul, and Baudrillard down very crooked paths. Disjunctive thought almost inevitably leads to attempts to eliminate--or at least to decry--one of the alternatives, usually the innovative one. "Television destroys politics! Television destroys literacy! Television destroys meaning! Down with television!" Such interjections enervate analysis and contemplation, as they seek to erase a part of experience (our experience with communication technologies) rather than forcing us to deal thoughtly with that experience.

A rhetorical analysis of the type offered here suggests that (1) the preachments of the antitechnology critics misdirect our attention away from rather than into the meaning-making mechanisms that are at work in mass-mediated communication enterprises, (2) the messages of such enterprises are comprised of multiple discourses that arise because of the copresence of social (collectivized) and technical (remanufactured) knowledge, and (3) the consumers of such messages (the viewers of nightly news in this case) are treated to meaning systems grounded in the socially sanctioned and familiar frames of (doxastic) interpretation and yet extended in the deculturing and defamiliarizing frames of technological innovations. The roll calls of places and people, together with the social framing of stories, construct a psychology of social form that is a force for stability, a sense of enduring time and place. Yet, the technological transportation across space and manipulation of time within an elongated sense of here and now is a force for innovation, for reframing our life experiences by pulling us into other realities and other perspectives on those realities.

Thus, for the viewers, the social psychologies of tradition and technology are jointly operative, making the viewing even of the news in eastern Iowa a complex psychocultural experience. The rhetoric of local news--that is, the power of relevant, formalized, public information--goes well beyond its narrative structures, its electronic spectacle, and its encapsulation of new information. The rhetorical power of local news resides in its ability to reconcile structure, spectacle, and informational content in forms that arouse and then satisfy a full range of human interests in the old and the new, the stable and the destabilizing. The rhetorical power of local news lies in its ability to anneal discursively multiple times and places--multiple experiences--into a seemingly unitary one.

Our experience with television, Roderick Hart (1994, p. 12) coos, is "unanticipated and, yet, curiously anticipatable." The curiosity Hart expresses arises from the dual social psychologies at work in viewing, the dual rhetorics through which we make meaning from what we see on the tube. That's why a large percentage of eastern Iowans turn to channels 2 (KGAN-TV), 7 (KWWL-TV), or 9 (KCRG-TV) at 10 p.m. on weekday evenings: to discover what Richard Campbell (1994, p. 327) sees as the psychological coherence, experiential sense of continuity, and social assurance that comes from viewing television news programs.

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Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this article was presented at the Midwest Sociological Society convention in Chicago, 1993. A fuller version, which discusses rhetorical analysis more specifically, is in Leah Vande Berg, Lawrence Wenner, and Bruce Gronbeck, Eds., Critical Approaches to Television (New York: Houghton Mifflin, in press). I thank the University of Iowa Center for Advanced Studies for providing the expansive environment that encourages the sort of speculative thought comprising this article; special thanks to its director Jay Semel and secretary Lorna Olson. Thanks as well to A. Susan Owen and manuscript readers for TSQ for their insightful critiques.