Acts of Meaning

As I woke up this morning to NPR on my clock radio, I was struck by this story featured on today's installment of Morning Edition. The report tells of the "culture of deception" that characterizes America's leading subprime mortgage lender, Ameriquest. In the report, former employees discuss the shady sales practices that were not only accepted but also encouraged by Ameriquest managers. It is even stated that loan officers at Ameriquest were trained by a showing of the film "Boiler Room."

By way of disclosure and explanation, a younger version of myself thought that "Boiler Room" was a decent movie. But please do not take this post as any sort of film critique. What is noteworthy and useful to my anecdotal report about this film is the way it was latched onto by many of my peers who entered into the financial services sector within a few years of its release. On more than a few occasions, references to this film were made by my colleagues in casual conversation. And the general tone of their commentary was always celebratory and glorified, as if there was something specifically appealing about the lifestyle and general conduct of the characters in this film: something that each of these separate individuals aspired to achieve.

It is not a profound or controversial statement to suggest that the average late-adolescent male might find the idea of bombastically making lots of money to be quite an alluring proposition -- particularly if the accrual of this wealth can be carried out in a covertly deviant, legally suspect and rebellious way. But the film ends as a cautionary tale of greed and excess. And the moral we are supposed to leave with is one that insists that we pull our base selves up by the bootstraps and come to grips with the consequences of our actions lest we hurt innocent people with our recklessness. At least that's the logical, common-sensical way of looking at the film - that we're supposed to learn a lesson, we're supposed to leave the theatre with some understanding that the fate of the film's characters and the narrative mechanism of the plot ought to be advisory in some way.

Apparently that's not the case with this film. Apparently there's something more instructive than the plot device applied. Or maybe our baser selves are attracted to the shimmer, sparkle and flash of overblown glamour to the extent that cautionary tales make little or no headway in defusing the human pursuit of self destruction. Regardless, Ameriquest saw an opportunity to provide its sales force with an instructive cultural model. The culture of deception that floats in this film is the same culture of deception Ameriquest managers thought relevant to their project of internal corporate identity. And it is that same legitimate cultural model that was appealed to by my cohorts in the financial services sector.

It may not be surprising to know that these individuals no longer work in financial services. Indeed, subprime lending has gone out of political and economic fashion in the past several months. Foreclosure rates are climbing and the doomsdayers talk about the forthcoming economic bubble bursts. Depending upon your outlook and what you have at stake, the sky may indeed be falling.

But it's hard to point the fingers of blame, and that's certainly not the point of this post. As recent college grads looking for work -- any kind of work in a poor jobs market -- my friends never intended to do the dirty work of the subprime lending business. As filmmakers, Ben Younger and his staff never intended to engender a corporate culture of deception. "Boiler Room" is not responsible for tipping into motion some giant cycle of events that ultimately leads to a possible economic catastrophe.

So then, what is the point? If we can't blame the media for causing the problems of culture, we certainly can't hope that the media could ever solve them. To help get there, I want to mention an idea that has stayed with me from an undergraduate course that I was taking right around the same time that "Boiler Room" was in theatres. In his book "Acts of Meaning," Jerome Bruner introduces the idea of a "folk psychology," a concept that is useful for any conversation about the role of the media in the construction of culture. After hearing this morning's piece on Ameriquest's boiler rooms, I thought of this idea and went back to the text to look for some illumination. This is what Bruner offers:

All cultures have as one of their most powerful constitutive instruments a folk psychology, a set of more or less connected, more or less normative descriptions about how human beings "tick," what our own and other minds are like, what one can expect situated action to be like, what are possible modes of life, how one commits oneself to them, and so on. We learn our culture's folk psychology early, learn it as we learn to use the very language we acquire and to conduct the interpersonal transactions required in communal life. (35)

I mention this idea because it points directly at and reaffirms the power of the media practitioner. Media makers can and do shape and shift the folk psychology because we are involved in the actual production and construction of the "possible modes of life." Through a dynamic interaction and relationship with the cultural reality, media makers can subtly move the cultural language and shift our agreed upon cultural connotations.

As a piece of mass mediated culture, "Boiler Room" is both part and parcel of our folk psychology. But so is NPR, and Bruner's work, and, to some degree, so is this class blog on media ethics. In this regard, I don't mean to cast aspersion on the contents of culture, only to point out an anecdotal case of one way that mediated culture functions in the construction of identity and culture and why ethics is important in the management of mediated messages. I also wanted to echo a point that media practitioners ought to be endlessly preoccupied with: the consequences of their acts of meaning.