Politics and the virtual event: An overview of the Hill‐Thomas hearings

Abstract

The article characterizes the hearings conducted by the Senate Judiciary Committee in October 1991 relative to Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas as a virtual event. That is, the event was a highly dramatic encounter arising unexpectedly that possessed the human qualities needed to attract media attention but that effected no immediate, statutory changes in the polity. The article isolates four characteristics of the virtual event—generic density, hermeneutic density, textual density, and psychological density—and traces these features to the quite postmodern assumptions that television now brings to the political sphere.