Radio vs. the Internet.

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 choose to distract ourselves.

I love radio. 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. 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.

But I am a child of my generation, which is aging fast. Radio was there from the start for me, and television wasn't, thank God. 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 also listened to "Suspense"; "The FBI in Peace and War"; "Tom Corbett, Space Cadet"; "Johnny Dollar"--he was an insurance-claims investigator, can you imagine?--"Let's Pretend"; and "Sergeant Preston of the Yukon." My grandfather gave us a television set shortly after the time when all-music formats drove the serials off AM radio; maybe he sensed that something had gone out of the world and a replacement was needed. But as much as I liked "Captain Video," he was no "Shadow."

Now my relationship to radio is different. 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. Sometimes I am moved to buy a book as a result of this. I do worry, though, that all this process, valuable as it is, is (music excepted) largely about information.

This might not seem like a problem, but it is. 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. 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." And it happens only when there is a kind of rapt attention, something you give to a poem or story. Maybe this is why Garrison Keillor at his best works so well: you pay attention, and your attention is answered wonderfully.

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. 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. 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. 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. I have to pay attention to it, even interact with it. 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. I can see the attraction--that is my problem precisely--of why someone would spend hours at this. And it would all be in pursuit of information, not wonder. Wonder requires a kind of quiet and distance, the kind you can't have at a keyboard.

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. But something in the nature of the thing runs the other way. We pay for the seconds, the minutes, the hours spent there. It's something like someone stomping his foot impatiently, waiting for the next move. It isn't even as calm as chess, which isn't really calm. It's a "what's next?" medium. A friend who recently found himself addicted said, "I hope I get tired of this soon and lose interest." He knows there is something strange about it.

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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. 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. I don't agree with those who think that this is something like citizen's band radio, a passing fad; this is much deeper and more important. 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; reading a trashy novel can be just as distracting. What's wrong is us, with our need for distraction and our unwillingness to encounter silence or stillness. 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; and this says more about us than any of the ways we choose to distract ourselves.