Tiny Microphones and the Aesthetics of Amateurism
A shortcoming in the language of online video
When it opened in 1942, NBC’s Radio City building in San Francisco was a marvel. Visitors could enjoy air-conditioning and peer through lobby windows into the state-of-the-art control rooms. A mural on the art-deco facade “symbolizes the vast extent of radio and the unlimited service it gives to all the lands and all the peoples of the earth,” NBC said in a press release.
The building’s seventh studio, Studio G, followed an experimental design. Concerned that some guests might not be comfortable around all the broadcasting equipment, NBC decorated the space like a standard living room, with soft furniture, coffee tables, and even drapes. Talking on the radio would be like sitting in a salon, though one with more wires than in a standard home.
The need was short-lived. Within the decade, the age of TV arrived and soon, microphones were a regular sight. Filmmakers had long ago found ways to keep microphones out of shots—on booms above the frame, especially. This worked fine for TV dramas and sitcoms, too, but the nonfiction shows were on the street and in studios. There was no hiding the microphone, and there was no hiding from the microphone. Reporters held microphones in their hands in the field, late night hosts had one on their desk, game show hosts carted them across the stage to stick in contestants’ faces, and talk show guests wore them clipped to their lapels. The microphone was a symbol of authority—the person in control of the microphone was in control of the screen, the person on the other side of it was there to inform, entertain, or answer.
Now we’re in another age. A new language is developing for a smaller screen. And the microphone has shrunk as well. A trend in social media videos is to use a microphone that’s comically small, barely holdable between two pinched fingers, or to clip a lapel microphone to anything other than a lapel. It’s a bizarre, confusing prop that betrays a deeper confusion built into the platform.
The modern TV mic took a while to develop. In his landmark 1960 documentary Harvest of Shame, Edward R. Murrow wore a microphone on a necklace (it kept his hand free to smoke one of his ever-present cigarettes—the smoke of which sneaks into interview subjects’ closeups at times). This is a lavalier microphone—its name comes from a type of French pendant. This gave way to the lapel microphone, clipped, as the name implies, to a jacket lapel.1 In other shots, reporters carried handheld microphones with boxy labels carrying the station logo. The industry name for the boxes is flags—they call attention to the microphone.
In social media videos, the microphone evolved as well. At first, it wasn’t necessary. The mics on smartphones are generally good, and the lens is so wide that a person is bound to be close enough to get decent sound. Besides, external microphones for phones were wonky and largely limited to the media professionals who turned their phones into production tools (I tested various microphones and adapters in my time as a radio reporter). Amateurs making videos didn’t have a popular platform beyond the chaos of Vine or the already established world of YouTube.
Then came TikTok and Instagram Reels, and the role of the Influencer was now to be in motion, making constant commentary. People who pivoted to video could often be seen holding the in-line microphone of their earbuds as if it were part of a TV reporter’s kit. This, I believe, is where the trend of a pinched-grip tiny microphone took hold. It was awkward to see—the speakers generally leaned in close into the mics, affecting an awkward and unnatural posture. Never mind that these microphones were made to detect a person’s voice when earbuds were worn naturally. And never mind that a default sign of discomfort in front of the camera in the TV language was a lean into the microphone—imagine the startled person-on-the-street on the local Action News, unsure of where to look and bending uncomfortably (and unnecessarily) toward a reporter’s outstretched mic. The effect was sound that was, most of the time, thin and clipped, worse than the phone’s built-in mic would’ve captured. But, occasionally, the closeness gave an ASMR quality to the speech. This must’ve been part of the appeal.
Soon, influencers found lapel microphones and clipped them to anything except a lapel, effectively making new shapes of microphones. A guitar teacher I follow clipped a mic to a small model guitar. A stereo reviewer clipped one to a vintage Snoopy toy. The effect is strange. It’s not clear why the host is holding something so close to their face. But this makeshift microphone brought confidence. As video apps took over social media, and as algorithms fed more content from strangers than from friends, the oddly-shaped microphone became as ever-present as the circular reflection of ring lights in the speaker’s eyes.
It’s still a little jarring to see. The show Subway Takes pops up in my feeds a lot. I like it. The idea of a talk show set in a moving train has the anything-goes energy of the best of cable-access, and the conversations are typically funny. But the host and guests both speak into lapel microphones that are clipped to Metro Cards. In one video, a stranger asks what the host and guest are doing, because it looks like two people loudly talking into their transit passes.
This style has now circled back to its inspiration. PBS and MTV accounts have shared videos featuring tiny microphones that are shaped to look like their larger old-school counterparts. In the PBS video, it’s strange—why, when a reporter is in a TV studio, is he effectively using a toy to talk to us? In the MTV video, the guest—Justin Hawkins from the band The Darkness—seems actively uncomfortable. The microphone is so small, the reporter’s hand has to be just inches from Hawkins’s face. One side-effect of the old, bulkier, TV microphone was that it allowed a reporter to stand close to someone without getting too close—think of Bob Barker’s wand mic on The Price is Right.
As a symbol of the new medium, the tiny microphone is oddly poignant. It’s small for a smaller screen, and the confidence and authority seem to be missing, too. It plays at imitating the media it’s replacing, but stops short. Sure, the days are gone when a television producer could command swaths of city real estate (the San Francisco NBC building is now a parking garage), but reach is power, and there are accounts who command more regular viewers than network news does today. That power, however, isn’t so much in the hands of the people making the videos as it is in the platform that serves them and the algorithm that controls it. It’s true that the networks could fire an anchor or a host any time they wanted, but the world of online video is far less stable and the algorithm is more demanding than any program director ever was. A single slip-up can lose an account its audience. No one needs to be fired to be erased from view.
That uncertainty is clear in the amateurish effects and visual sameness that’s taken hold in social video. Tiny microphones, jump cuts, warped and pixelated graphics, inaccurate subtitles, haphazard background removal—these amount to some kind of style, I guess, but it’s not a style that communicates anything other than being in a hurry to follow a crowd. It’s not just that it abandons the basic elements of video production in favor of trend-chasing speed, it ignores the power (and if you’re civically inclined, responsibility) of having a platform in the first place. The new medium demands a new visual language. The one that’s being created is in constant retreat to corporate power.
Around the same time as the tiny mic trend began, another type of video filled my feeds. In these, the poster was talking into a substantial, professional microphone, looking out of the frame and an implied interviewer. These were fake podcast appearances—posters pretending to be on podcasts in order to give an air of authority. It’s another way of abandoning the inherent power of a platform to borrow credibility from another medium.
The strongest social videos have their own type of confidence, and develop their own language. New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie posts political analysis with a calm clear-headedness (while holding a wireless microphone at a comfortable distance). Jenny Nicholson’s four-hour review of Disney’s Star Wars hotel is, at first glance, the standard YouTube formula of direct address to the camera with cutaways and b-roll, but the clip is done with such preparation and research that it’s a joy to watch, even if you don’t really care about theme park hotels.
The need for boldness is urgent. Style and approach shouldn’t be shaped only in pursuit of profits, however futile the fight may seem.
In 1958, long after the living room radio studio was obsolete, and long after TV stopped being a novelty, Murrow gave a speech to a group of television executives. His focus was television’s role fighting "ignorance, intolerance and indifference.” It became an indictment of the medium’s direction.
“This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and even it can inspire,” Murrow said. “But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it's nothing but wires and lights in a box.”
As a person whose work often involves amplifying or recording voices, I’m frustrated by lapel microphones. They were built for a time when men wore suits on television. As such, they work if a person is wearing a suit jacket or blazer, but aren’t ideal with other garments—they look awkward and don’t work as well. They’re also not designed for people with long hair, which brushes against them.