7/31/2023 0 Comments Home teleprompterIn 1952, presidential candidate Dwight D. The new technology wasn’t without its hiccups, however. “The teleprompter became this device that transformed the eye into a hand,” she says. She uses the term “tactile vision” to describe this phenomenon that allowed the presenter to virtually reach out and touch the audience through the camera. “That opened up the world of politics,” says Alexander, “because for politicians, the ability to create eye contact with the domestic viewer is crucial.” While those first script aids were positioned off to the side of the camera, the modern teleprompter was born when another engineer, Luther George Simjian, created a way to superimpose the words directly on the camera lens, allowing the performer to retain eye contact with the viewer. The origins of teleprompters go back to 1948, when CBS engineer Hubert Schlafly collaborated with television actor Fred Barton to create a way to surreptitiously prompt actors filming a live daily soap opera by unreeling their lines on a roll of butcher paper offscreen. “What I bring to all of these technologies is a curiosity about when and where do these frictions occur, and why are we so quick to forgive our devices.” “The more ubiquitous technology and computers become, the more likely they are to disconnect, buffer, and fail us in different ways,” she says. “When a tool breaks down, that’s the moment of knowledge production,” says Alexander, who frequently looks at technology breakdowns in her research, exploring, for example, why technological failures such as buffering or planned obsolescence are often ignored or downplayed by both users and media scholars. The paper explores how the devices became so widespread in media and politics, even as we only seem to notice them when they fail. ![]() “It’s a technology designed not to be seen.”Īlexander has now filled in that lacuna with “ Paper, glass, algorithm: teleprompters and the invisibility of screens,” co-written with Keren and published last September in the Journal of Visual Culture. “It’s literally and metaphorically transparent,” says Alexander. Even in academia, it seems, the technology is invisible. ![]() Keren asked her to help with research, but Alexander was surprised to find that, despite the ubiquity of the technology in the 21st century, scholars have written almost nothing about it. “It creates the illusion that the speaker is actually able to memorize a talk - or else, that they are charismatic enough to give this wonderful speech without having to read it line by line.”Īlexander, who is also a scholar of science and technology studies, became intrigued by the uses and abuses of teleprompters when an artist friend, Tali Keren, staged a show in which participants were asked to use one to read aloud a speech by a televangelist. “It’s a technology designed to be everywhere, and yet nowhere,” says Neta Alexander, assistant professor of film and media studies. ![]() And yet, the better a teleprompter does its job, the less aware we are of its existence. Everyone knows that, when politicians make a speech, they are not reciting it from memory, but rather reading off a scrolling screen. ![]() The teleprompter is a technological paradox. Film and media professor Neta Alexander explores the paradoxes of the teleprompter.
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