Interpretive problems in the Age of Google: Another reason Richard Armitage’s tweeting will be interesting to witness

Images tweeted by @RCArmitage this afternoon, apparently as part of his promise to tweet production- and farewell-related material this week.

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To put it polemically: One reason that we contest education so hotly is that what we know constructs our world. We seem to be experiencing a shift about certain kinds of knowledge, however, as the Internet has drastically broadened the amount and types of information that’s at our fingertips. In our current atmosphere, how we know is gaining not a greater, but rather a more noticeable role, in what we know as a component of explanations of how we build our awareness of the world around us. This widespread ability of information has led some cultural critics that cultural literacy is easier to fake than ever before. If you don’t know a reference, or have an image, you can simply type something in a search engine and come up with a panoply of possibilities. This state of affairs has, in Servetus’ opinion, drastic consequences for higher education (that our often stodgy institutions may need a generation or more to catch up with): we simply have to redistribute the time currently spent on accumulation of information toward a greater focus on teaching students to excavate, criticize, and understand the mechanisms for obtaining information so they can be better consumers and users of it. While this focus on critical attitudes toward information has always been one purpose of higher education, it’s more true now than ever. Things that I spent weeks memorizing in undergrad (the timeline of modern English history, for instance) are now easily presented as data — but data is never neutral; it and its presentations always demand a strict, critical examination before they can simply be passed on.

Cough. Got a little off track there. Sorry, hopping back off soapbox. Right. Richard Armitage.

It’s interesting (and fits with what he’s said about himself as a visual thinker) that when Armitage asks for a response to his tweets, he asks for images as an element of them. Also suggestive: his own statements are often accompanied by (illustrative) images. And tempting to believe that the images in turn tell us something about him.

When Armitage tweeted these photos this afternoon, I thought “this looks like English rock group culture in the late 1960s or early 1970s” and I thought that might be Mick Jagger at right in the second photo. My visual and cultural literacy around this sort of music is limited — I enjoy the music casually, when it comes on the radio, but don’t seek it out or study its history or context. So I did a Google Image search, which yields the information that the first photo depicts a hotel room thrown on its ear by Keith Moon, drummer for The Who, and his groupies, and the second shows the Rolling Stones misbehaving by throwing food around at a Kensington hotel. Both photos are famous and likely to be known to viewers even slightly familiar with the histories of these groups, as well as to people who remember living through that period (I am a bit too young for that.). It’s an interesting joke given Armitage’s hashtag — simply because there are no farmers in these photos and this is not the sort of mess a farmer is likely to make.

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A tweeted response to Armitage’s tweet (author anonymized by me). I loved this reply not just because of its assertion, but particularly because of the emoticon, which suggests the replyer understands exactly the game we’re all playing, i.e., the tweeter does not believe this (picture) represents Armitage’s true self, either.

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We’ve already considered the likelihood that Armitage as he tweets is not fully congruent with “the real Richard,” but rather the Richard Armitage-approved version of Richard Armitage for public consumption. At the same time, his presence on Twitter is definitely intended to communicate some idea of “who he really is.” His “follow” list is stocked with publications he “follows” (if you read The Economist and The Guardian, Mr. Armitage, suddenly I feel oddly akin to you) and political viewpoints and charitable institutions he supports interspersed with colleagues and advisers and journalists and a smattering of people one imagines are real-life acquaintances or friends. The people he tweets (Amanda Abbington, uch) and what he says in those tweets place him in the world in just the same way that any tweep’s activities do — just like doing the ALS Ice Bucket challenge was a way to belong to the large group of British actors / heartthrobs / fan magnets who did the same thing around the same time. Note that this position can co-exist with Armitage the philanthropist; they are not mutually exclusive. My point is solely that while they these choices may reflect reality or pretense or some combination of the two, they are not spontaneous and off the cuff. Tweeting offers Richard Armitage the tweep an opportunity to display identity markers that will say something to the people who follow him just as it does for any of us; some of those may be organic and others aspirational, but without personal knowledge of the man it will be hard to discern which is which.

So — the pictures one shares are a subset of this question, a case study. I’m particularly fascinated by Armitage’s visual vocabulary for telling a story — since the images one recognizes and uses to tell a story about oneself might be assumed to be part of one’s cultural literacy. The image chosen sends a message not just about what one wants to say in any given context, but also about the vocabulary one possesses to say it. This hypothesis seems particularly compelling for someone who asks for images and tweets images as part of his own statements. (Much more transparently, let’s say, than his views on history, which would do a similar thing.) One assumes, of course, that Armitage is referring to a real state of affairs in hyperbolic terms — a messy dressing room that must be vacated, probably by Sunday morning at the latest, given the tight time frame for Kristin Scott Thomas’ appearance in Electra on the 22nd. Given what we know about him already, it’s hard to imagine he means this literally, because we can’t imagine him trashing a room to the tune of thousands of pounds sterling, as Moon apparently did regularly. And the recharge of information about his sense of humor that his previous tweets have provided us with suggests that he wanted to make a joke about it.

And so the wheels start churning. What do they tell us as a representation of his sense of humor? Since Freud, no one’s considered jokes simply random — we assume the kinds of jokes one tells say something about the teller. What do they tell us as a representation of the sort of pictures Armitage is familiar with? Is he a fan of this period of British music? Or does his resort to these images reflect a more general level of cultural literacy in the UK about the period in question? Maybe Armitage is the sort of person who keeps this kind of photo stored on his phone, which would tell us something. There’s also the (remote) possibility that he searched for an image of messiness cold and paged through till he found these. What seems most likely to me, however, is that he knew the images he wanted to illustrate a joking attitude about the state of his dressing room and searched for them in particular. Which just raises more questions for me — humor? hyperbole? unfulfilled wishful thinking of someone who wishes he was wilder than he is? Or, it nags at my brain: entirely random? But selected with some sort of critical knowledge of what he wanted to say?

At any rate: as the images Richard Armitage tweets pile up, it will be interesting to think about what they say about his sense of humor, his visual world, and his hypothetical cultural literacy.

~ by Servetus on September 10, 2014.