Technological Fallacies

One of the things I'm fascinated with is the way technologies allow folks to abdicate a position of accountability in public discourse. This week offered another example of what we might call the technological fallacy (pretentiously, a fallacy ad mediatio?), wherein a speaker introduces a flaw in the mechanics of mediation as a justification for a breakdown in communication. An interview with Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo abruptly ended after two questions, due to a "phone malfunction."
The interview was a conference call with journalists from Baltimore prepping for an upcoming Dallas-Baltimore tilt. The phone failed (and continued to malfunction preventing Romo from getting back in the call) after questions about Romo's consistency. Certainly, there are more publicly consequential examples of the technology being blamed for a failure of human communication. John McCain's reluctance to use a teleprompter in his 2008 campaign was used as an excuse to forgive him for inaccuracies in speeches. An undated story about United Airlines' 2002 bankruptcy resurfaced in 2008 and caused UAL stock to plummet before traders figured out what was happening.

But the Romo example is useful because of the other ways technology figure into the story as functions of sports reporting and the sport of football. While Romo and the Cowboy's media relations folks were shrugging their shoulders and pointing to the phone, the Baltimore reporters were taking to twitter. And so, not only does Romo have trouble blaming the phone while other communication resources remain active, the effectiveness of the beat writers turning it into an instant story illustrates precisely why we shouldn't use media as an excuse for communication breakdowns.

In our contemporary moment, technological inability is more a liability than a function of plausible deniability. But even as the Baltimore writers are trying to insinuate that Romo's phone malfunction was subterfuge, the twitter back-and-forth devolves into pure conjecture about what was heard on each side of the telecommunication divide. The reporters can make their accusations, but they'll have to report that the phone malfunctioned, which either lets Romo off the hook (by leaving his phone of the hook) or shifts the story away from Romo's consistency to the Cowboys' ability to afford decent company phones.

One of Romo's apologists, ESPN's Tim MacMahon, tweeted: Romo "doesn't get rattled by the media."Well, that might be true if media means reporters, but if media means telephones, apparently Romo can be rattled. But even there, notice how the agency shifts. Reporters can't rattle Romo because he's savvy, but the phone can't rattle Romo because it's merely a phone. Nothing Romo can do about that, so let's all move on. Again, Romo's particular case offers a counterpoint to the logic of plausible deniability that makes the fallacy ad mediatio cook. Professional football (the American variety, at least) relies on wireless communication to send plays from the sideline to quarterbacks like Romo. It's pretty much a helmet phone. When the helmet phone fails (as it's been known to do), Romo's public is a lot less forgiving of him wasting a timeout, running a broken play, or turning over the ball because the phone malfunctioned. At the end of the day, the mediating function of the helmet phone shouldn't determine the content of a football game. It is either an indication of our excessive dependence on mediation that we imbue it with agency when we judge communication acts or a signal of how little we value human capacity to master technologies in a technological age. Either way, it's a bit baffling that in the 21st century we're comfortable with our judgments about accountability being so easily dissembled by a shrugging of the shoulders before a digital technology.