The movie world, the music world, the entertainment world, the show-business world, the TV world, the internet world -- we live in a maze of worlds today, and all them seemingly connected by invisible wires. But this connectedness, this inter-connectedness, this hyper-connectedness, is this a good thing?
Well, if you've watching a good movie in a comfortable movie theater, you don't want to be interrupted by cellphones going off, iPads being activated or even people talking loudly. Right?
In a recent interview, the writer George Steiner spoke about "the constant din" that surrounds us 24/7 now in this postmodern high-tech world we have created. He was speaking of the need to find silence from time to time, to get away from the constant din of life.
And then Time magazine essayist Pico Iyer wrote a splendid op-ed commentary in the New York Times the other day titled "The Joy of Quiet."
Pico's in his 50s. George is in his 80s.
Things come together. After reading the Steiner interview last year, I took the way he spoke of "the constant din" to have an extra meaning, and I put some quotation marks around the phrase and shortened it to "the CD." And by CD I mean "constant din" and by "the CD" I mean "the constant din."
I sent the new coinage over to the folks at Urban Dictionary, and 23 hours later, in the midst of the constant din, the editors there accepted it and "the CD" is now part of the online dictionary. In addition, I sent the link over to Facebook, I blogged it and then I made a YouTube piece about it as well. And then I sent the entire linkage event by email to both Mr Steiner and Mr Iyer.
A new meme is born.
Steiner was asked in a recent interview conducted by a young woman: "You have argued that new technologies are a threat to the “silence” and “intimacy” necessary for an encounter with great works."
Steiner, now 82, replied: ''People are living in a constant din. There is no more night in cities. Young people are afraid of silence. What will become of serious and difficult reading? Is it possible to read Plato while wearing a Walkman? I find this very worrying."
Iyer, for his part, spoke about how how had read an interview with cutting-edge designer Philippe Starck. What allowed him to remain so consistently ahead of the curve? Iyer asked himself, and then he asked Starck the same question:
"I never read any magazines or watch TV,” Starck told Iyer. “Nor do I go to cocktail parties, dinners or anything like that.” He lived outside conventional ideas, he implied to Iyer, because “I live alone mostly, in the middle of nowhere.”
Iyer also thinks that silence is golden.
"In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them -- often in order to make more time," he op-edded in the Times.
