The date was June 11, 2001. That morning, 10 witnesses in Terre Haute, Indiana, watched McVeigh die by lethal injection. Back in Oklahoma City, 232 more witnessed McVeigh’s final moments via closed-circuit broadcast. But while closed-circuit witnesses recalled that a restless, wary silence pervaded the remote viewing room, live execution witnesses reported a more comfortable, noisy, and positive atmosphere.
I spend much of my time on these warm, summer days focused on family members, survivors, McVeigh, and his execution. I’ve considered this event while wearing both my legal scholar and communication studies scholar hats. I keep pondering the different atmospheres in the remove and live viewing locations. Had I had to predict which environment would have been noisier, I would have picked the remote viewing location—not only were there more people there, but I would have thought that atmosphere would have been less oppressive than that in a witness room adjoining a lethal injection chamber.
This would suggest that the farther one gets from the event, the looser the controls become over speech and silence during the act of witnessing. Clearly, participants’ remarks supported the opposite of this observation. An explanation may be found, however, by switching the focus from how far removed witnesses are from the witnessed event to whether the target of witness’ communicative actions was within communicative range. Thus, it is more likely that the converse is true: that closed circuit witnesses in Oklahoma City had little reason to break silence because McVeigh, the target of any communicative efforts they would have made, was literally remote, appearing through a mediated image. It was the live witnesses standing in a room removed from McVeigh by only one wall who stood in communicative proximity to McVeigh.
This change in focus was provoked by a conversation I had with a colleague concerning the college graduation of his daughter. Graduation day temperatures soared to 90 degrees, and there was limited shade for attendees, prompting college officials to open a remote witnessing location featuring a big screen in the campus chapel. Attendees in the chapel, including my colleague, could see everything of note—individual graduates receiving degrees, the enthusiastic cheering of live spectators. However, when remote witnesses’ loved ones received their degrees, the remote witnesses did not cheer or clap; a “sheepish few” clapped, but did so half-heartedly and stopped their clapping very soon. There seemed to be little purpose in communicating in the absence of the communicative participant, particularly in view of the code of silent witnessing that was imposed. So with the differences in communicative activity in the closed circuit location in Oklahoma City and the witness room in Terra Haute.
But I’m not entirely satisfied yet with this explanation. Any thoughts?
Posted by Jody Madeira on June 18, 2010 at 09:45 PM
Comments
You ought to attend a pub gathering where the assembled are watching their team play in the World Cup via satellite telecast to compare their behavior to that of those actually in attendance at the match. My feeling is that the distant audience is only slightly more subdued as a general matter and often exceeds the attending audience in noise level at certain points.
Posted by: Peter Young | Jun 19, 2010 4:05:09 AM