Several years ago, I went to Times Square. It was nearly overwhelming. I wasn’t a stranger to cities, but the sheer number of advertisements silently shouting for my attention was decidedly and impressively noisy. Much like Times Square, our culture is equally shouting for our attention.
There are so many messages from so many different places being constantly presented to us. How can you know which to pay attention to, let alone which ones to believe? We are presented with an information and opinion overload. We can know more about our friends weekends, random Wikipedia facts, and in-depth commentaries on any subject than every before in history. If you want to keep your sanity, or at least have time for other things, you have to be judicious in your reading selections.
We’ve become so used to noise that we almost aren’t comfortable without it. It’s something that conditions us. How long could you sit in a blank room without anything to do? No phone, no computer, not even a book or another person to talk to. Such silences can be boring or dull. But what of when we can’t stand hearing ourselves think? The desire for entertainment and input ought not to overpower our ability to sit with ourselves. The distractions of our culture are particularly negative when they become medications that soothe us from thinking.
Beyond the external noise of our day-to-day lives, there is also such noise that can occur in our own heads. The thoughts, doubts, desires, insights, confusions, and clarities that jumble together on a daily basis can be just as overwhelming as the fabled Jumbo-Tron in Times Square. If we were to return to that blank room, part of the discomfort can come from that time-consuming and even exhausting task of trying to sort out the mess in our own heads. Knowing who you are, what you are about, or where your passion lays is a deeply difficult undertaking.
This is not to say that you have to become a social and technological hermit. It is important to be connected with others, to learn from them, and to be cognizant of the world around us. But such awareness and interconnection ought not to come at the sacrifice of our ability to see clearly through the swirling mass of messages in our culture. It’s a “if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything” sort of deal. In the whirlwind of ideas, culturally or in our heads, we have to pick the best ones to believe.
It is our challenge, then, not just to live in context of the external and internal noise present today, but also to communicate through it. But this living and communicating does not look like adding another billboard or shouting a little louder. It starts much smaller and much more simply than that. We ought to find the important and true threads and follow them tenaciously. We ought to think, speak, and live through the noise.
Originally published in the Willamette Collegian. Inspired by the 2007 Communicators for Christ Tour.