I was thinking today about how many kids I (for the most part, unfortunately) know who, in social situations, play the role of “noise-maker,” as I’ll refer to it for now, and nothing else. Their contributions to conversation are rarely clever, deep, or even authentic, but they get by with quantity and vibrancy. Not that I’m in much a position to judge, having a relatively small sample size to make the broad generalizations which I, nonetheless, will be making, but it also appears to me that the frequency with which these individuals play such a role roughly correlates with those populations less disposed to reading. Here, at least I think, is why:

The vast majority of individuals in my generation have been, in many ways, raised by Television and similar media. Now, even the most rudimentary understanding of psychology tells us that one’s formative years include a socialization process by which one is immersed into, and thus learns to function within, human society. This is how we learn most of our speech patterns, and the subtle social cues never explicitly taught to us. For the greater part of human history, this process occurred in the simple context of one’s engagement with family members and peers, flowing in the natural rhythms of human interaction; however, in a generation where a good deal of that time was spent before the TV rather than other “real” individuals, it seems natural to presume this socialization process was, at least in part, done by the figures on the screen. Why should that make a difference?

Because almost everything that happens of T.V. is scripted, scripted so that conversation flows with rapid speed and constant relevance and quality. The pauses, the slowed down speech, etc. which is required for most human beings to actually have clever, meaningful, or deep dialogue is sheered cleanly from every script, socializing us into thinking all of us should be able to consistently engage in rapid, meaningful discourse at speeds which simply don’t provide adequate time to come up with the real substance of a good conversation. Why is awkward so prevalent a description? Why do long periods of silence seem so gutturaly vulgar to us? Because we were socialized into a fictional universe where such pauses don’t exist.

All these natural elements of human conversation as it has existed for decades are, in a very real sense, alien to us. At a deep, unconscious level, we simply can’t bare silence, can’t bare anything but the rapid-fire dialogue of scripted unreality, and, thus, we take stale, shallow, meaningless conversation that at least mimics in shape and format such discourse. Here, I believe, is where the “noise-maker” comes into play. Contributions which would otherwise be obnoxious, trite, pointless, etc. have become highly valued, because they fill those dreaded pauses and keep at bay the ever-looming threat of silence; silence with out which we simply can’t cogitate adequately to provide stuff of substantive conversation. 

For those of us raised more on books then television (though almost none of us escaped it completely), we’re caught in the gross divide between these two spheres of socialization. On the one hand, we feel the clammy, gut-churning discomfort of a silence we weren’t adequately socialized to handle, but, on the other, we’re equally disturbed by the vapidity of so many conversations which we must stomach for the sake of social acceptance. We have to try and overlook the vacuous comments and inane interpolations. We have to try and ignore the eerie way in which so many will laugh, welcome, and even seek out the most meaningless contributions if they carry with them enough volume and vibrancy to ease the aches of ill-equipped social psyches: the psyches of those who were, for better or worse, socialized by a screen.