Let me tell you about the great party my housemates and I threw on Saturday night. The party was themed, the theme being “roll up your jeans, put on some waterproof shoes, wade into the bathroom and furiously plunge the toilet!” (We’re still waiting for the souvenir T-shirts to arrive from the printers.) It was a small affair, comprising two of my housemates and myself, as well as one visiting boyfriend, who kept insisting, “I didn’t put anything in it, I swear!”

As you may have surmised, this was less a party and more a mild plumbing disaster involving an overflowing toilet and a group of inept tenants. After going through two plungers and three of my reluctantly-surrendered bath towels, we finally got everything back in working order. We mopped the floor three times, and I laundered my towels with copious amounts of detergent — I even splurged for the washing machine’s “SuperCycle” because I figured the peace of mind was worth the additional 25 cents.

Though it was a nuisance to deal with, I felt far worse for our downstairs neighbors; I had the regrettable fate of answering the front door at midnight to find them standing there, wondering why their ceiling was leaking. Downstairs neighbors, if you are reading this: I am deeply sorry that our toilet water was dripping from your bathroom light fixture. If it’s any consolation, the water was surprisingly clean (for something that has come out of a toilet).
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I was watching Felicity the other day. Why are you giving me that look? It’s not like I was watching The Babysitter’s Seduction, a made-for-TV movie starring a 19-year-old Keri Russell as the innocent babysitter bedded by the creepy widower, portrayed effortlessly by that guy who now plays the father on 7th Heaven. Especially since said movie was playing on Lifetime, which doesn’t even come in clearly on my television, and do I really seem like the kind of person who would waste an hour of her life squirming uncomfortably as a blurry Reverend Camden lures an equally-blurry teenage girl into the bed still warm from the body of his suspiciously dead wife?

What’s that? I seem like exactly that kind of person? Let’s move on.

As I was watching Felicity, I inevitably began to reminisce about the first time I had seen it: it was ninth grade, when graduation still loomed comfortably on the horizon. I didn’t know any college students, nor had I ever been on a college campus — in fact, everything I knew about college I had learned from watching melodramatic TV shows aimed at ninth graders.

Gleaning information about college life from teen dramas is, of course, only slightly more accurate than learning about astronomy from Star Trek. In ninth grade nothing struck me as unusual about Felicity being able to foot her entire tuition bill with a barista job, but now, years older and wiser, I’ve come to realize the extreme inaccuracies upheld by three popular portrayals of campus life: Felicity’s “University of New York,” Saved by the Bell: The College Years‘ “California University,” and Gilmore Girls‘ “Yale.” What follows are the trademark — yet blatantly mistaken — characteristics of TV college.
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Like the responsible columnist that I am, last Thursday found me planted on my couch, watching the presidential debate. As one of the less… shall we say, germane columnists, I spent a good deal of the time drowning out the debate with yells of frustration because ever since quotation marks were invented, politicians have been unable to speak in anything but sound-bites — and not exactly William Jennings Bryan-caliber sound-bites, at that. Goodbye, “cross of gold”; hello, “help is on the way” and “of course we’re after Saddam Hussein — I mean bin Laden.”

When I wasn’t curled up in the fetal position and moaning in agony, I noticed something interesting: Bush’s podium was higher. The NBC broadcast, which I was attempting to watch, would often show a split-screen view of both candidates at once so that you could see Bush’s nervous lip-pursing as Kerry attacked his presidential record and Kerry’s scary grin as Bush accused him of sending “mixed messages.” And though the two candidates were standing behind seemingly identical podiums, the one Bush was standing at seemed to be about five inches higher on the screen.

Of course, it wasn’t that Bush’s podium was five inches taller than Kerry’s; it was that Bush is five inches shorter than Kerry. The cameras’ positions were such that the tops of the two candidates’ heads were even, which meant that five more inches of Bush’s podium were peeking into the bottom of the shot.

It was a curious phenomenon, and one that was likely to be at least partly deliberate. Granted, the pictures were coming from two different cameras, and the camerapersons no doubt wanted to fill as much of the frame as possible without zooming in on Bush so closely that you could see his pores. It makes sense to keep the cameras at the same distance so one candidate doesn’t look like he could pop the other’s head off as though he were a Barbie doll.
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A couple of weeks ago, in this very space, I examined the commonly-held notion that technology is a panacea for all our communication woes, narrowing the gap between face-to-face conversation and long-distance exchange and thereby increasing the intimacy of everyday communication. I determined, in typical social science fashion, that technology can both improve communication and worsen it.

One the one hand, communication over a distance is made ever more like talking face-to-face; on the other hand, technology is now used more often to increase the efficiency rather than the intimacy. Essentially, you’re giving Mercury some turbo-powered wings for his feet, but then you’re bashing his kneecaps with a tire iron.

Then I threw in some stuff about The Facebook so that someone would actually read the column. Today, instead of pop culture references, I have — to use a nominalization that would make any prescriptive linguist cringe — a graphic.

Below, you will find the Hierarchy of Communication, a list of various forms of communication listed in a convenient low-to-high-involvement format. “Involvement” is the amount of personal involvement intrinsic to the medium — to put it another way, the likelihood that any given mode of communication will make a person feel smothered and/or uncomfortable.
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