Austin Hall Library

Too Much Noise

I recently ran across Teresa Tomeo's Noise: How Our Media-saturated Culture Dominates Lives and Dismantles Families and I read it last weekend. A more popular treatment of the subject than Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, which I have previously mentioned here, Tomeo focuses on the negative ways in which the popular media impacts the family. It is an up-to-date analysis of the mind-numbing impact of one aspect of modern culture. The book is full of stats and may be particularly helpful in assisting parents of Christian faith come to grips with the fact that too much media is not a friend of the family.

There is a great quote by Pope Benedict XVI on the front cover of the book: "Put simply, we are no longer able to hear God . . . There are too many different frequencies filling our ears."

More Efficient and Less Free

I returned late last evening from a trip--a trip that made posting blog entries on a computer difficult. I was not, however, without the ever present BlackBerry device. Nor was I without my iPod, which has Homer's unabridged versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey. When I awoke this morning my first thought was of the computer. It startled me--the way one is startled by standing too close to a high ledge and comprehending that he is only inches away from destruction. I was impressed by the sudden realization that each year for at least the last ten to fifteen years, I have become more efficient while at the same time becoming less free.

I don't want to be rid of all technology, and I wouldn't even know how to do that, but it seems to me that there is something less than human about dependency upon material objects intended to be of use to human beings. That, in part, seems to be the point of Wendell Berry in his essay "Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer." Note the nine standards for technological innovation in his essay. Berry is a champion of agrarian ideals and a free man.

By the way, this is the second time I have written this post this morning. Upon trying the enter my prior version, I received an error message on my computer and lost all that I had written. That would never have happened to Wendell Berry.