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| WHITE NOISE | |
 October 19, 1999 
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RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: Everywhere you hear or see them: Americans on the phone, relentlessly tied to the phone, walking down the street, or driving a car. The popularity of cell phones is just the latest indication that an epic sensory shift is occurring in America. We are becoming people of the ear, desperate for sound, the reassuring noise of human voices. Go to a restaurant where young professionals gather, and what you will remember is not the taste of the food, but the din, people happily having to shout at one another. Those of us who grew up in the 50's, when television was young, remember our mothers' warning: "Don't watch so much TV," our mothers used to say, "or you'll go blind." But that was before Elvis Presley and long playing records, and before the music got louder and louder. Much of our newest technology is aimed at the eye: The computer screen, of course, and digital TV, and video games. But the hunger for sound in America is such, today's mothers worry their children will go deaf. In any large American city, you can find clubs where the young dance all night, drugged by noise. Sound systems have become so highly developed that the music sweeps across the room like a wind. Twenty years ago, when the Sony Corporation began selling the Walkman, there was a question as to whether people would be willing to walk down the street looking like outer-space travelers. Today the old -- as well as the young - happily resemble astronauts. Communications experts like Marshall McLuhan date the birth of our modern age with the shift of learning from the ear to the eye. Johannes Gutenberg's invention of moveable type in 14th-century Germany was the beginning of European modernity, because it gave the printed word mass circulation. After Gutenberg, Protestantism, democracy, and most important, individualism flourished. We assume today when we come to a library, we will find silence. We assume that people learn in silence, each alone. But this is a modern idea. In postmodern America, we seem headed on the freeway back to the 14th century, before Gutenberg, to the time when monks read aloud to each other. Americans are listening to novels on tapes they drive home from work. A friend says she was so captivated, listening to a Thackeray novel the other day, she sat in her driveway until the chapter ended. NARRATOR: "I trust you have made a copy of this account," said Miss Pinkerton herself. RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: If the printed word gave us individualism, the price we paid for our individualism was loneliness, which is why, I think, we are so intoxicated by the sound of another voice: We want to be assured that we are not alone. So, we pay to eat at a noisy restaurant or to attend a rock concert, the most flamboyant communal gathering in our society, where no lyric is decipherable in the scream. (Singing) We are facing a paradox, however: As modern people, tired of isolation, we grow desperate for the sound of another voice. But as modern people caught in isolation, we use sound to shelter ourselves from the crowd. What troubles police officers, after all, about the person in the car talking on a cell phone is that he seems not to be paying attention to the traffic around him. A teenager boards the bus wearing earphones, and sitting next to him, you are forced listen to the annoying tish- tish-tish from his earphones; the teenager sits oblivious. The other day on a crowded elevator, a woman on a cell phone told someone at the other end that she had decided to have an abortion. The rest of us stood there, silently, pretending not to listen. Postmodern sound becomes insulation from society, as much as it reassures us that we are not alone. Instead of returning us to an ancient circle of the tribal fire, where we learned and spoke as a group, we may end up a nation of people talking in the crowd to another voice, far away. I'm Richard Rodriguez. |
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