Ticktick white noise tv#
Where they live and their TV set.” The global reach of the media creates the illusion of global awareness, it encourages opinions on subjects that in truth we know little about, what DeLillo himself has referred to as the “facile knowledge market”. One of Jack’s colleagues says at one point, “For most people there are only two places in the world.
Ticktick white noise how to#
Of course, the standard reaction is to say, “But I know how to separate what I see on a screen from real life!” And yet time and again we confuse the map with the territory. Instead he’s urging us to recognise the way media representations work on our unconscious, “causing fears and secret desires”, and to acknowledge that, for all McLuhan and Baudrillard’s postmodern wackiness, they were right to draw attention to this theatrical, assimilative quality in media technologies, to the structure of the medium irrespective of content. But DeLillo isn’t urging us to throw away our flatscreens and laptops and iPhones – this is no Luddite impulse. During a coup, there’s a reason one of the first places the new regime parks its tanks is outside the TV and radio stations. One of the things DeLillo is constantly drawing attention to in the novel is this nexus between mass media and tyranny, not to assert any trite MSM conspiracy theory (although he certainly predicts the rise in popularity of such thinking), but rather to examine Walter Benjamin’s assertion that the aestheticization of politics – turning it into entertainment, spectacle – is an integral ingredient to fascism. He teaches ‘Hitler Studies’, which focuses on the ‘continuing mass appeal of fascist tyranny, with a special emphasis on parades, rallies and uniforms,’ and above all on ‘propaganda films.’ As his colleague and friend, Murray Jay Siskind, observes, “Helpless and fearful people are drawn to magical figures, mythic figures, epic men who intimidate or darkly loom.” For Jack, this comes in the form of the Führer himself. In layman’s terms, the compass is off and north could be anywhere.Īs new waves of information crash in on Jack’s life, and he’s cast increasingly adrift in a sea of swirling signs and meaning, uncertainty over the knowledge he possesses makes his need for certainty more craven and desperate. This palimpsest of real and mediated experiences – dreams as TV and TV as dreams – results in what Mark Fisher refers to as “the terrain of chronic ontological subsidence”. So thoroughly embedded in the consciousness of the characters is this media reality that foreground and background begin to merge – dialogue takes on the fast, slapstick rhythm of sitcom a billowing toxic cloud caused by a chemical spill assumes the presence of a B-movie monster occult tales about UFOs, ESP and ghosts depicted in lurid supermarket tabloids mix queasily with reality and truth, to the point where ‘reality’ and ‘truth’ have to be hooked by quotation marks, like slabs of meat bound for the relativist slaughterhouse. They interject in the narrative with snippets of random, unrelated dialogue, overheard amid the urban static of daily life. And at the centre of everything, the novel muses on death with a capital ‘D’, and what dying means to someone living in modern America’s cult of the eternal Now.Īs the Western world inexorably slides towards Dystopia Defcon One, what’s particularly striking about White Noise is its examination of media technologies and their kaleidoscopic effects, and how they shape our collective experience. It ponders how the throwaway cultural superstructure – all that white noise disarming and distracting us – works its way back to the opaque, seemingly impenetrable economic substructure, and it muses on who’s in control of these forces, or whether anyone’s in control at all.
Ticktick white noise windows#
As the novel progresses, we’re offered windows onto personality cults and fake news, conspiracy theory and outrage culture, the global financial system and the strip mall lifestyle. The story is narrated by Jack Gladney, middle-aged professor at College-on-the-Hill, who lives with his wife Babette and a brood of kids in the fictional suburban everytown of Blacksmith. It is, as writer Tim Powers put it, “altogether resistant to containment or antidote.” I’ve read it maybe half a dozen times and it never ceases to work its magic, to glitter anew. It is satire, thriller, mystery, pulp SF, dystopia, family sitcom, campus novel and metaphysical disputation, yet deeper and wider than any of them, almost as if it were using genre for fuel, burning through different registers as it rockets its way into the starry void.
In 1985, American writer Don DeLillo published his ninth novel, White Noise, a tour through the media-saturated, information-glutted, consumer-driven inferno of the modern age.
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