In Barbara Kingsolver's fascinating new novel, The Lacuna, the protagonist writes this in a 1946 letter:
"The radio is at the root of the evil, their rule is: No silence, ever. When anything happens, the commentator has to speak without a moment's pause for gathering wisdom. Falsehood and inanity are preferable to silence. You can't imagine the effect of this. The talkers are rising above the thinkers."
I'd been pondering the lessening of silent reflection in our age of instant-response blogging and tweeting and the resulting rarity of signal in a tsunami of noise, when I came upon that concern about the effect of radio. Does sound familiar, doesn't it?
Laughing at myself, I pictured a tribal curmudgeon railing against the advent of drummed messages -- "So what's wrong with running to other caves and just telling them the news?" (It's too slow, Pops.) Maybe smoke signals were also decried by change-resistors. We know the greatest communication leap forward -- the printing press -- had its opponents. The hoi polloi getting their hands on books? Surely it was the end of wisdom as then known, to the few.
Despite seeing the absurdity of those nay-sayers of the past, I'm taking a 2010 stand for fewer communications, for timeout for reflection and maybe even a little research before we all hit the Post/Send/Publish buttons. The result could well be more signal and -- wahoo! -- less noise.
Remember the news about bloggers who keeled over on their keyboards, so to speak, so wired to be the first to post in their fields of expertise that they ignored a few basics, like sleeping and eating?
You probably don't know anybody that driven, but a lot of us are still over the line of reasonableness. Are there people you've had to Hide on your Facebook feed because they post nothingness a dozen times a day? Have you gotten unchecked rants full of falsehoods, forwarded to you as gospel despite having been debunked by snopes months/years ago? And how about the toxicity levels? Getting a lot of knee-jerk fury?
In 1946, radio gave air time to every kind of talker, including racists and xenophobes, their venom amplified and available on every radio set. Now, anybody with thumbs and a phone can "broadcast" an inanity, a falsehood, a fantasy, and/or any level of rage they're experiencing at the moment.
There are movements for Slow Food, Slow Cities, Slow Travel -- I guess I'm in a movement for Slow Blogs. (I rarely show up here, and send out my own Heads Up messages no more than once a month.)
Yes, I know all the admonitions that to build an audience you must post daily, but very few people can pull that off -- I'd certainly be babbling if I tried it. And I don't want people on my screen who haven't thought their ideas through. Am I really alone in that? Bet I'm not.
Are we "talking" or thinking? Let's hear it for silence, for the pause in which we gather wisdom before we put some signal Out There in all the noise. And thank you, Barbara Kingsolver, for the reminder of how long this has been going on.
Follow Ann Medlock on Twitter: www.twitter.com/giraffeheroes
It's not just the lack of silence, radio and television are augmented with digital sound processing (dsp) that increases the perceived loudness. Broadcasters have discovered that listeners scan for the loudest station, so they install a device called an Optimod (tm) that keeps the broadcast loudness at the maximum, bolstering the quite bits, and trimming down the peaks so that the station always sounds as loud as possible.
NPR and the classical music stations tend to be more natural in their sound. It's not pleasing to listen to a symphony that blasts out of the speakers at a uniformly loud level. Like silence, the soft passages emphasize the drama of the loud.
Alas, I am one of the culprits. As chief engineer of WCFA, Cape May's low power community FM station I quickly discovered that "loud and proud" are what's wanted by the on-air personalities and most of the listeners.
"Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.”
--- Sir Winston Churchill, 1874-1969
Thanks for the reminder to quiet our minds and tongues. Now, I believe, I'll sit and meditate.
Chandra
We really need to get back to nature. If we did, we'd learn to appreciate silence. We'd notice sounds that are soothing, like water or the wind, and we'd see real colors and natural light. We'd smell wonderful scents and maybe catch a glimpse of something startling, like a shooting star or a snake. We'd pay attention to time according to the seasons, not commercial holidays. If we could only get people out into nature more, maybe there would be less chatter and a little more calm.
Helene
drugs. But it would make sense to Just Say No withstand and weaken the tsunami of Facebooking,
Twittering, Tweeting, Instant Messaging, YouTubing, and even Blogging.
Trying to avoid hurt feelings, a psychologist friend of mine, years before the Internet, needing to leave a meeting, prefaced his departure with this heartfelt plea: " I'm leaving now, but please don't consider it a relationship comment."
Radio got me through. And it got me through the long years afterward.
I think of radio as the oldest of the technologies and I am hardly overloaded by the newest because I can barely figure them out.
Radio is my connection to something present, happening in real time. I like the chance to be connected beyond the borders of the vineyard; just as I needed to be connected to something alive going on outside of the dying in my earlier household.
Time to gather my thoughts and relish the pictures and words in my head, undisturbed, is a wonderful thing. In this particular case of radio, I don't want to blame the messenger for the absence of silence because I have chosen to fill it this way.