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Continued... Page 7 > Expert Witness at Trial Watch a TV news show and see how long the commentator speaks without a visual aid appearing over their shoulder on the screen. It is usually no more than three or four seconds. The reason for this is that talking heads are boring, whether they are on the TV screen or live. Remember those terrible early days of public television where talking heads were ubiquitous and the programs were full of dry, academic figures endlessly spouting even drier academic information? Talking heads are a turn off, whether on a PBS show or an expert on the stand in your case. Predominance Of Visual Imagery In The 1990s Jurors are much more visually sophisticated in the 1990s then at any other prior time in American history. Photographs, television and films have taken a predominant role in popular culture. Many social commentators have bemoaned the fact that fewer and fewer Americans read on a regular basis. In this vein, Paul Connolly, the director of the Institute for Writing and Thinking has observed: We have become such a sophisticated culture that we are intolerant of a 400 page book, and want forms of communication that are more efficient and immediate. After 500 years, we may have outgrown Gutenberg. Look at the instrument panel on your car and you will see proof of how visual symbols are now being used in place of words to tell people what to do. Even for people without artistic skills, computer graphics and video cameras let people express things visually that could only be done with words ten years ago. As trial lawyers, we figure out how to harness the trends in modern society and popular culture to persuade and communicate with our jurors. A fundamental assumption of the advertising industry, which spends billions of dollars to figure out what the public wants, is that visual images are the most effective way of persuading other human beings. Advertisers assume that human beings are filled with a variety of unfilled urges and motives which swirl around in their minds, seeking resolution. Advertisers seek to latch on to one or more of these lurking subconscious drives and go for the soft underbelly of the American psyche where their messages have the greatest likelihood of getting by the consumers' defenses. Communication guru Marshall McLuhan has stated: Gouging away at the surface of public sales resistance, the ad men are constantly breaking through into the Alice in Wonderland territory behind the looking glass, which is the world of subrational impulses and appetites. |
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