Tuning In the Signal
I have always considered myself a technophile. I love gadgets and can't wait to install the computer from Star Trek in my home. But lately I am beginning to worry that progress might be robbing us of an important metaphor - tuning in an AM radio station.
Now, I know that there still are AM radio stations. Otherwise, how would hate-mongering pain-medicine addicts reach their target audience (in-bred Kentuckians with fall-out shelters)? But it’s just not the same with modern radios.
I remember driving through rural New Hampshire as a kid (I know, as opposed to urban New Hampshire) on a clear, cold night, searching for AM stations in our Opel station wagon – the one with the new experimental fibreglass body courtesy of my father’s Yankee spirit and the road crew’s love of salt. As I twisted the dial, the silence would flare into crackling static, flash with a burst of noise – was that music – then revert to static. Quickly, I would reverse directions, twisting the dial back a little slower now. More static, then… yes… definitely music before reverting to static again. Again a reverse, but this time with the slow patience of a hunter, tracking the elusive prey of the AM station.
Tuning in a station wasn’t just a means to an end. It was a process of discovery and an adventure. On those clear winter nights, you never knew where the station might come from. One time, we picked up a station in Ohio… Toledo, I think. And there was that sense of possibility, like buying a lottery ticket. Would it be cool music? Or some fire-and-brimstone preacher? Some funky college station or the play-by-play of a local high school football game? Sometimes, we could even pick up stations in French. French! How exotic was that!?! (Sure, it was from Quebec which was technically closer than Ohio, but it seemed so far away.)
Slowly, this time, as I approached the true signal, the static would die away and the signal would grow stronger. There is was: the station. Music. Big band music. Fun. Interesting. Universally appealing (at least to those in the car). But would it last and where was it coming from?
What a perfect life lesson that was. So much of my experience has been like that: some disruption of the calm followed by a flash too quick to really identify, but enough to draw me back. Finding the true signal was never simple. It involved rocking back and forth over the same territory again and again. And sometimes, even after all that work, the signal was still too weak to really identify and it was time to move on. But when it finally came in, how satisfying. I would listen to try to figure out where that signal was coming from and what it had to say.
So, what metaphors are left to us today for this sort of searching, for learning how to quiet the static to get to the signal? In a world of “seek” and computer tuners, where you don’t even need to use Google to find www.myheartscontent.com, how will kids learn about hearing that true voice, how life simply takes trial and error?
I take comfort in remembering that the days of analog AM tuners were merely a blip in human history. Somehow, in the generations before Marconi humans struggled with the same issue and somehow found a way to make sense of it. To make sense of that embodied feeling of knowing that happens all too rarely, that moment when you don’t know it in your head, but in your bones. To relate those moments when it feels like a voice, quiet and sure and wise, whispers to you and you know to trust it. And to warn others that the non-stop chatter in your head – the worry, the shoulds, the what-ifs – that the nagging voice that never really shuts up isn’t really real, it’s only static.
But still, what a great experience of turning that dial, cutting through the static, and finding that true signal… and wondering where that station was really coming from and what would come on next.
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