Why bother calling it White Noise when it’s just another Noah Baumbach film? White Noise reviewed

These days, everyone who was knocking around a few decades ago predicted the internet. Marshall McLuhan famously predicted the internet in 1962. Orson Scott Card predicted the internet in 1986. Even David Bowie is supposed to have seen it coming. But I think Don DeLillo really did prophesise our 21st-century technological reality in his 1985 novel White Noise.

White Noise is about a lot of things (mostly, it’s one of the funniest novels ever written about death). But something weird keeps happening in the gaps. Characters are interrupted by the TV, by the radio, by a market researcher who keeps phoning them up to ask about the exact blend of fibres in their clothes. In every aspect of their lives, they’re constantly bombarded by invisible waves of data and messaging. There’s no such thing as a private life, inside, away from the chatter that descends from every corner of the world.