Curious case of billboard’s strong reaction

Published Jan 24, 2016

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Rory Williams

What fascinates me about the debate over the short-lived “Zuma Must Fall” billboard at the top of Long Street is not the message, but the significance attached to the medium.

Certain statements will attract attention regardless of where they appear, but this one had been simmering quietly as an online and offline meme for ages until the act of putting it on a physical billboard created enough heat for the pot to boil over and generate vociferous debate.

Whatever people believe about the statement, isn’t it curious that the reaction is heightened when it appears on a billboard that is seen “in real life” by only a few thousand people, when the sentiment had already been expressed and seen in other media by hundreds of thousands of people without those instances becoming news in the same way.

It’s possible that it was simply a case of ANC supporters spotting an opportunity to create a tenuous association between the message and the DA-led municipal government, and using the act of physically tearing the billboard down to add newsworthy drama.

But I think this is more than just political manipulation. DA politicians were just as quick as anyone else to condemn the banner, apparently sensing that this was somehow more serious than the usual murmuring online and in newspapers.

What we say in public matters very much. But what difference does it make whether it’s an actual billboard or social media?

Would the reaction have been less if someone with 100 000 followers had simply tweeted the hashtag? Yes, this story needed something physical to start the feeding frenzy. But it is the crossover between offline and online realities that adds spice to the story, with manipulated photos adding confusion and interest, and a second billboard extending the meal.

There is something else, too.

When a Facebook post is hateful, there is an outcry, and rightly so. But the reaction to this particular case suggests that there is a selectivity going on where we think that a statement is only “marginally wrong” until the choice of medium tips it over to the bad side of a very hazy line.

Even if it’s “just politics”, it succeeds because the general public responds to the physicality of it. We still have this quaint notion that a manipulated image of a billboard is less serious than the “real thing” on the side of a building, regardless of audience size.

Do we pay more attention to a billboard because it took the commitment of money to put it up?

In many respects a message that is paid for (like a billboard) is less influential than messages that are spread by personal endorsement (like a viral or Facebook post), because we attribute value to what our friends post and repost. But we do notice when money talks.

There is also something significant about physical reality that evokes emotional responses.

I don’t use the word “emotional” in a dismissive way. We respond emotionally to all sorts of physical contexts, and it’s what architects and urban designers work with as they try to make us comfortable.

There is an emotional jolt in seeing something so stark and unambiguous up on the side of a building.

The incongruence and scale of it affects our reaction to the message itself. It’s as if a full-page ad in this newspaper was bought by an advertiser who kept the entire page blank, except for a tiny line of text in the middle of the page.

It would catch our attention, because it would be unexpectedly different from the rest of the paper, and because it would seem an extravagance to pay for an entire page to say so little.

It would no longer work if it became commonplace, and that is one of the differences between a billboard and a tweet.

But these contexts are beginning to merge as the online and offline interplay becomes stronger. An app on your smartphone can already interpret what your camera is pointed at, adding a layer of information to the image – augmented reality.

Eventually that layer will change what you see in real time as people gather around objects of interest and add their own content, like an interactive movie that the audience writes on the fly, responding to each other with endless memes and permutations of online and offline content.

What is reality then?

@carbonsmart

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