Radio vs the Internet
Garvey, John
JOHN GARVEY RADIO VS. THE INTERNET Only the Shadow knows Are you on the Internet? I was asked this twice in one day, first by a bishop and then by a priest. It made me wonder about the ways we...
...My grandfather gave us a television set shortly after the time when all-music formats drove the serials off AM radio...
...I know how easily, even how happily, I am distracted from things I should be paying attention to, and this seems like one more kind of noise, one further distraction, added to the possibility of renting a movie or watching television, and, unlike radio, I can't really have it on in the background...
...medium...
...and "Sergeant Preston of the Yukon...
...It's something like someone stomping his foot impatiently, waiting for the next move...
...When William Carlos Williams says about poetry that "men die miserably, every day, for lack of what is found there," he speaks about something that begins, sometimes anyway, with "The Shadow...
...It made me wonder about the ways we choose to distract ourselves...
...But as much as I liked "Captain Video," he was no "Shadow...
...Wonder requires a kind of quiet and distance, the kind you can't have at a keyboard...
...A friend who recently found himself addicted said, "I hope I get tired of this soon and lose interest...
...Maybe this is why Garrison Keillor at his best works so well: you pay attention, and your attention is answered wonderfully...
...Most of what I listen to is public radio, since other radio is usually as bad as television...
...I listen to good music, well-conducted interviews, intelligent exchanges, and better news reporting than I can find anywhere else...
...What's wrong is us, with our need for distraction and our unwillingness to encounter silence or stillness...
...Try that with a book and you get mustard all over your shirt...
...After I was asked about the Internet I began to wonder about my aversion to it...
...This is something like the attention you bring to reading, though there is a nice lazy difference to a story or a good interview-you can move around the kitchen, make tea or a sandwich, or salad, listening to it...
...and this says more about us than any of the ways we choose to distract ourselves...
...The FBI in Peace and War...
...It's a "what's next...
...I also listened to "Suspense...
...I can't quite say I hate television, because that implies a lot more passion than I have about the subject, but I think it is a real drain on our culture, and even at its best it doesn't have the engaging quality of radio...
...But I am a child of my generation, which is aging fast...
...The worst of both worlds: a tar-baby combination of television's passive captivity with the attention and involvement reading and writing demand, with neither the seriousness of good, solid reading nor the permanence of any writing that matters...
...Now my relationship to radio is different...
...I am not hooked into it, on purpose- not out of any strong sense that there is anything inherently wicked about the Internet, but rather because of a kind of self-preservation...
...This might not seem like a problem, but it is...
...We pay for the seconds, the minutes, the hours spent there...
...It isn't even as calm as chess, which isn't really calm...
...It offers an illusion of intimacy without the risks of real intimacy, a version of connectedness that doesn't really connect, and this is appealing to a lot of us...
...It isn't the technology that is wrong...
...Our fear of silence may be a fear that silence will show us to be empty, will judge us without having to say a word...
...But the eagerness with which people have jumped at it makes me think it is one more kind of noise, or like inhaling all the time and never exhaling...
...Johnny Dollar"-he was an insurance-claims investigator, can you imagine?- "Let's Pretend...
...One of the very few nonchurch, noncharity donations I make is to WNYC, New York's excellent public radio station, and it is a selfish one: I would hate to lose it...
...He knows there is something strange about it...
...I am not opposed to the technology of the Internet-e-mail makes sense in a lot of ways, and there is something interesting about having all that information available...
...this is much deeper and more important...
...I don't agree with those who think that this is something like citizen's band radio, a passing fad...
...I loved sitting in a dark living room under a long table listening to "The Shadow," looking through the back of a large radio set at glowing tubes that always seemed to me like a science-fiction city of the future, letting Lamont Cranston's suave way of dealing with criminals give me one of my first warped pictures of adulthood...
...I have to pay attention to it, even interact with it...
...Maybe we will get to the point when being online will allow for long silences, blank pages, the equivalent of the fountain pen started and then stopped, or the listening that poetry demands...
...Tom Corbett, Space Cadet...
...And it happens only when there is a kind of rapt attention, something you give to a poem or story...
...And it would all be in pursuit of information, not wonder...
...maybe he sensed that something had gone out of the world and a replacement was needed...
...But something in the nature of the thing runs the other way...
...Radio was first a way into wonder-the wonder, maybe, of pulp fiction or cheap thrills, but it did have to do with wonder, which matters deeply, and not only to kids...
...Sometimes I am moved to buy a book as a result of this...
...reading a trashy novel can be just as distracting...
...I love radio...
...Radio was there from the start for me, and television wasn't, thank God...
...I do worry, though, that all this process, valuable as it is, is (music excepted) largely about information...
...I can see the attraction-that is my problem precisely- of why someone would spend hours at this...
Vol. 123 • May 1996 • No. 9
