![]() Roman mosaic of choregos and actors, from the House of the Tragic Poet, Pompeii (Wikimedia Commons)Īs theater and politics merged - particularly as the Roman Republic gave way to the Roman Empire - applause became a way for leaders to interact directly (and also, of course, completely indirectly) with their citizens. And thus turning himself into, ostensibly, one of the world's first human applause signs. At the close of the performance, the chief actor would yell, "Valete et plaudite!" ("Goodbye and applause!") - thus signaling to the audience, in the subtle manner preferred by centuries of thespians, that it was time to give praise. "Plaudits" (the word comes from the Latin "to strike," and also "to explode") were the common way of ending a play. ("And they proclaimed him king and anointed him, and they clapped their hands and said, 'Long live the king!'")īut clapping was formalized - in Western culture, at least - in the theater. The Bible makes many mentions of applause - as acclamation, and as celebration. What they do know is that clapping is very old, and very common, and very tenacious - " a remarkably stable facet of human culture." Babies do it, seemingly instinctually. Scholars aren't quite sure about the origins of applause. It was the qualified self giving way to the quantified crowd. It was public sentiment analysis, revealing the affinities and desires of networked people. Applause, participatory and observational at the same time, was an early form of mass media, connecting people to each other and to their leaders, instantly and visually and, of course, audibly. This is the story of how people clapped when all they had, for the most part, was hands - of how we liked things before we Liked things. We clap because we're generous and selfish and compliant and excitable and human. We clap because something is totally awesome. Our methods are serendipitous and also driven, always, by the subtle dynamics of the crowd. ![]() We find new ways to express our enthusiasms, to communicate our desires, to encode our emotions for transmission. We friend and follow and plus-1 and plus-K and recommend and endorse and mention and (sometimes even, still) blogroll, understanding that bigger audiences - networked audiences - can be their own kind of thunderous reward. We retweet and reblog the good stuff to amplify the noise it makes. We clap for each others' updates on Facebook. We find ways, in short, to represent ourselves as crowds - through the very medium of our crowd-iness.īut we're reinventing applause, too, for a world where there are, technically, no hands. We applaud, in the best of circumstances, enthusiastically. ("When we applaud a performer," argues the sociobiologist Desmond Morris, "we are, in effect, patting him on the back from a distance.") We applaud dutifully. In the studio, in the theater, in places where people become publics, we still smack our palms together to show our appreciation - to create, in cavernous spaces, connection. It was a way for frail little humans to recreate, through hands made "thunderous," the rumbles and smashes of nature.Īpplause, today, is much the same. Applause, in the ancient world, was acclamation. But it made a fitting postscript to that empire's long relationship with one of the earliest and most universal systems people have used to interact with each other: the clapping of hands. Heraclius's tactic of intimidation-by-noisemaking, the audible version of a Potemkin Village, did nothing to stanch the wounds of a bleeding empire. So the emperor hired a group of men to augment his legions - but for purposes that were less military than they were musical. But he knew that the Roman army, in its weakened state, was no longer terribly intimidating, particularly when the intended intimidatee was a barbarian. Heraclius wanted to intimidate his opponent. In the seventh century, as the Roman empire was in the decline period of its decline and fall, the emperor Heraclius made plans to meet with a barbarian king. And then, suddenly, just when the colors and outlines settle at last to their various duties - smiling, frivolous duties - some knob is touched and a torrent of sounds comes to life: voices speaking all together, a walnut cracked, the click of a nutcracker carelessly passed, thirty human hearts drowning mine with their regular beats the sough and sigh of a thousand trees, the local concord of loud summer birds, and, beyond the river, behind the rhythmic trees, the confused and enthusiastic hullabaloo of bathing young villagers, like a background of wild applause.
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