For any broadcaster, “dead air” is an embarrassing professional lapse. And so the goal is always to monopolize the channel.
Modern electronic media began nearly 100 years ago with two clear reference points. If you were issued a license, you could be a broadcaster. Your transmitter sent content along a channel in the region’s electromagnetic spectrum reserved exclusively for the station’s use. This is still true for local entities such as WABC-TV in New York or Philadelphia’s WXPN radio. Commercial broadcasting began in the 1920s when Americans were eager to consume content sent into the “ether.” That pattern put us on a long path toward becoming involuntary spectators to the performances of others.
I keep coming back to this basic idea when I think of humans and their preferred communication styles. Some—let’s say too many—prefer to be broadcasters. They are comfortable devising content they believe others need to hear. They are “on” continuously and mostly without pause. The disinhibitions of alcohol can make the pattern even worst. Others of us are receivers, often by choice, and sometimes because broadcasters rarely offer breaks that would allow sufficient time for the functions to reverse. You know the feeling if you are at a party and a 50,000-watt broadcaster crosses your path. They may see themselves as having a clear channel that must never go silent. For any broadcaster, “dead air” is an embarrassing professional lapse.
I confess to sometimes being a broadcaster. In education it’s called lecturing. I am probably too certain that I have important things to say. But I understand that a good teacher must also hone their skill as a receiver. Unless you are accompanied by a 10-piece band and a juggler, one-way communication offers diminishing returns. Broadcasters frequently misread the patience of others as signs of their brilliance. They flourish from the goodwill of conscientious listeners. Such listening is all the more remarkable since those doing it get few rewards for the courtesy of their interest.
Maybe you have escaped the experience so far, but the news that you will be spending time with a group of compulsive talkers may mean that the broadcasters among them will have already programmed the entire evening. Your efforts to jam their channel can easily fail, forcing a decision about how Soviet you want to be in disrupting their dominance.
There just aren’t many ways to silence these full-time transmitters, let alone turn them into effective receivers. The natural informality of conversation especially makes it hard to preserve an adjacent channel for weaker but worthwhile signals coming from others. Even so, there are at least a few desperate gambits that may momentarily knock a broadcaster off the air:
-Express amazement that they managed to arrive on two flat tires.
-Mention the contagious disease you can’t seem to kick.
-If it is their affair, ask them if the dining room chandelier always emits sparks and smoke when it is on.
The high threshold implied in the word “invention” explains why writers block, speakers freeze, and the rest of us may fumble through even a simple response.
Sometimes we can be surprised by a word that pulls us up short. We didn’t expect to see it on the page. Such a moment came to me as an undergraduate dutifully slogging through the words of the important Roman rhetorician and statesman, Cicero. He noted that creating a message to be presented to others was an act of “invention.”
That’s it. For 50 years I’ve puzzled over that term. You might suggest that I ‘get a life,’ but my sudden annoyance was triggered by this less-than-obvious word summing up a communicator’s obligations. I wasn’t ready for a term that seemed to scale up a process that seemed like it should be less onerous. Bach or Edison might have been the creators of “inventions.” And give Tesla and Berliner their due. But surely writers and speakers can get by with a lot less. It seemed like overreach.
Bear with me a moment. There’s a useful lesson here.
Most of us think of language and its various forms are already “out there.” I was certain that good lines of argument or amplification came from prior forms that were adapted, borrowed, or recycled from other sources. And there is a sense in which this is true. But the Latin “inventio” implies more. The idea sets the bar higher. Indeed, the original term sits there on the page as something of a taunt: it begs us to believe that an effective speaker or writer is on the hook for engaging in a full-fledged act of creation. It turns a communicator into an originator rather than a user, an active agent rather than a pliable imitator. After all, invention was presented not as a minor idea, but the term that would represent the most important of the traditional five “canons” of rhetoric, along with arrangement, style, delivery and memory.
Are creative word-workers really in the business of innovating their ways through the world, like so many garage tinkerers who have given us gadgets we didn’t know we needed? To be sure, inventio is sometimes translated from the Latin to mean “discovery,” or the process of “devising” a “stratagem” for a suitable verbal response. It turns out that Latin doesn’t a have rich vocabulary in this area. Even so.
Lest you think we’ve drifted into the realm of counting angels on the head of pin, the challenge Cicero laid down is real. We confront acts of invention every time we sit in front of an empty sheet of paper or a blank screen. Some kind of situation requires an appropriate response. It might be a death in the family, a note to explain why we can’t attend an event, or—at the other end of the scale—an explanation of a guiding principle in American foreign policy. Cicero’s point is that the best response to the question “what can I say?” should be more than a paste-up of another’s ideas.
Fluency requires bending words to the peculiar social circumstances that lie before us.
This explains a lot. The high-engagement threshold of invention accounts for why writers block, speakers freeze, and the rest of us fumble through a simple response that we wish we could retrieve. The hard truth is that off-the shelf comments usually don’t work very well. Ideas meant for another time and audience often sit dead on the page.
The lesson coming from this single word is hard for my students to grasp. To be a writer means committing to an innovator’s level of engagement. Good writing is work. Knock-offs of written or spoken prose are easily revealed as the counterfeits they are. Fluency requires bending words to the peculiar social circumstances that lie before us: a task unsuited to the intellectually lazy.
