TIME OUT:No new technology is on the same wavelength
IS THERE anything more intimate than the radio? The marvel of Marconi never wears. It speaks to us when we desire company and is silent when peace is our desire. It is by turn informative, instructive, inspirational, entertaining, engaging and enraging, trivial and profound, calming and energising and a backdrop to our lives.
The radio is company when we are alone. It is companionable when we walk. It is passenger in our cars. It is patient in our pockets. It whispers secretly to us on Dart, Luas, bus or train. It protects us from external chatter. When we are ill, it is beside us. When we are sad, it distracts us. When we are happy, it enhances our mood.
Like the village gossip, the radio knows what is happening and tells all. Each day it scuttles and scurries with every tit bit of news, recording and repeating the latest events, what people think about them, who is saying what, going where, doing what, with whom, when and why. Was there ever a gossip so efficient? Yet unlike the gossip, the radio allows us to listen impartially and it does not pry for reciprocal salacious reward for its hearsay. It begins our day.
The radio makes no demands. It does not stipulate that we be attentive to its voice, that we sit and listen to its conversation, that we agree with what it has to say, that we respond to its message, that we deliberate on its proposals, concur with its propositions or defend its arguments. It allows us to eavesdrop and earwig blatantly and brazenly on everything it says.
The radio is the perfect companion. It is not offended if we work while in its company. It allows us to tune in and out of its discussions. It is narcissistic in its ceaseless chatter but without ego in requiring no response. Nor does it demand eye-contact to reassure it that we are attentive. It makes no protest when we silence it and it is immediate when we call upon its company again.
Radio has distinct advantage above visual media. It respects our imagination, recognises our capacity to visualise what we hear, to colour what we envision and see with our own minds. It allows us to hear colour, see sound, taste music, feel conversation and be touched by all our senses simultaneously.
Unlike the busyness of television, the hyperactivity of internet, the insistence of mobile and the rigidity of print, radio is personal in its communication. There is primordial reassurance in listening to the human voice. There is reassurance in listening to the sounds of one’s own language, the strains of one’s culture, the dialect of one’s tradition and the reassurance of its tone.
In an insular time in Ireland before we were plural, multicultural, cosmopolitan and global, it was magic to access with the whirring of a dial, the incomprehensibility of other tongues, the sense of other places and music that was unfamiliar to our ears.
There is a wonderful moment in Frank McGuinness’s play Dancing At Lughnasa when the radio in the house kicks into life and the sisters one by one are seduced into dance with its traditional jig. They abandon all that oppresses them, disregard all that restrains them in wild ritualistic confluence of time and place, music and tradition, past and present, all that was longed for but never achieved and all that was achieved at the expense of their happiness.
For those moments brought to them by radio, they ignite and recognise the dormant passions of their parched lives and the loves that might be possible for them, in a wild abandon that unites them in their shared history, separateness and togetherness in the Ireland of their time. And that is radio.
Forget sociological analysis or psychological investigation, the radio is present, personal and persistent and while technologies may advance I challenge any to overtake this intimate stranger with whom we share our lives.
mmurray@irishtimes.com
Clinical psychologist Marie Murray is director of psychology in UCD's student counselling services. Her weekly radio slot, Mindtime, on Drivetimeis on Wednesdays on RTÉ Radio One