‘Do you remember listening to the radio for the very first time?’ asked David Hendy at the beginning of his thought-provoking series of late-night essays on Radio 3 (which you should still be able to catch on Listen Again).
‘Do you remember listening to the radio for the very first time?’ asked David Hendy at the beginning of his thought-provoking series of late-night essays on Radio 3 (which you should still be able to catch on Listen Again). His question was not intended to conjure up memories like my own glimpse back to the draughty kitchen of the vicarage where I grew up when Uncle Mac announced on Children’s Favourites my brother’s request for ‘Greensleeves’. But that moment when for the first time you became aware you were listening to an ethereal voice emanating from a man-made Bakelite box in the corner of the room. It’s the moment when you crossed over and became truly one with the band of dedicated converts to the magic of radio; when you finally succumbed to the mystery of wireless technology, to the realisation that your imagination has been taken over by someone sitting in a soundproof studio thousands of miles away (and if you’re a young boy like Hendy twiddling the knobs to make ethereal connections with radio stations in Hilversum, Moscow, Tirana).
Hendy, in his five essays (produced by Matt Thompson and evocatively entitled ‘The Ethereal Mind’, ‘The Cultivated Mind’, ‘The Anxious Mind’, ‘The Fallible Mind’, ‘The Superficial Mind’), has been probing the impact of the new technologies on our neural pathways. Did we change as thinking human beings once Marconi had sent his first message by wireless across the Atlantic in 1901? Was this a groundbreaking leap forward in Darwinian evolution? And are we witnessing another such extraordinary transformation with the invention of the internet? Are we in fact rewiring our minds?
It’s incredibly hard to think back to a world without Chris Evans, Sarah Walker and John Humphrys; to news that takes a week to reach us, and being able to hear only the music that we can make ourselves. Were we any different then? What did the first listeners to the Home Service make of W.B. Yeats reading to them his poem, ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ as if he was sitting with them in the front parlour? Did the world suddenly become a less lonely place, a more rational and peaceful community, lulled into acquiescence by the strings of the Palm Court Orchestra and the harmonious melodies of Sing Something Simple?
The wireless revolution, argues Hendy, is as significant as Gutenberg and the development of mass printing. It has stirred up ideas about the nature of thought itself and the transmission of intelligence. The BBC, especially under its first director-general, John, later Lord, Reith, took on the solemn task of ensuring that this new radio world was as democratic and as good for us as possible, offering ‘accurate thought’ to the masses. With missionary zeal (and a keen eye for commercial profit) the fledgling Corporation attempted to impart ‘into the greatest possible number of homes everything that is best in every department of human knowledge, endeavour and achievement’. What changes, though, might such moments of connection make on our brain circuitry?
Are we, for example, more susceptible to depressive illnesses now that we can hear instantly and unceasingly about the horrors we can and do inflict on each other, or which are unleashed on the unsuspecting by a malevolent universe? Has it made us more anxious? What, too, has been the psychological impact of the TV camera, with its ability to show us ‘the fleeting emotions of everyday life’? Has it created a new ‘tyranny of intimacy’? Where next after Google, Twitter and YouTube? Are these internet phenomena chipping away at our capacity for concentration? What has happened to the ‘accurate thought’ sought after by Reith and his contemporaries?
It’s too late now, of course, to draw back from the digital revolution. What has been let loose can no longer be retracted. I wonder, though, what you would be prepared to live without? I think I could survive quite happily without Google and certainly without Twitter. But if you threatened to take away my radio(s) I would kick and shout. Only on Sunday, after a few days’ withdrawal, I switched on the radio while brushing my teeth to find myself drawn in by Mark Tully and his unmissable Something Understood programme (Radio 4). This week’s theme was ‘Longing for the Sea’, and Tully spoke with the Welsh poet, Gwyneth Lewis, who spent two years at sea visiting all the ports that had once received coal from Cardiff. She talked about the experience of being ‘spooked’, when suddenly for no reason, on a perfect, clear day, she and her husband had to turn back. She later understood that it was because they suddenly knew they were just about to leave completely the reach of land and be forced to rely entirely on their own efforts. A moment. A conversation. An absolute connection.
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