Talking air

IT'S one thing to switch on the radio, sit down and listen to a discussion or a concert or a ball match. It's quite another to listen to the radio in the way that many of us have come to do in recent years, as a background drip feed of information and entertainment. There are still people who listen to radio in the old way but nobody takes the slightest notice of them anymore. Marketing people are interested in those who "consume" radio in much the way cows eat grass. The radio is kept continuously on and "grazed" as a way of passing the time.

The difference between programmes on RTE Radio One between 7.30 a.m. and 2.45 p.m. is a matter only of name and tone. All of them, from Morning Ireland to Liveline, deal with the same pool of material. On any given day, if there is no major story bubbling, they will seek their content in slightly different places but all are essentially engaged in knee jerk reactions to public events.

There is a tendency to think about the talk that happens on radio as analagous to the talk in people's intimate lives. But in our private lives, after a certain amount of talking, someone gets up, leaves down the coffee mug and does something. This does not apply at the public level, where talk exists for its own sake. Radio talk is a way of filling in the silence which the airwaves abhor.

The truth of this can be observed in the discussion that followed the murder of Veronica Guerin last Wednesday. Everything that was said last Thursday on Morning Ireland, The Gay Byrne Show, The Pat Kenny Show and Liveline, had been said many times before on the same programmes, probably by the same people. Commentators, experts, Ministers, Opposition spokespersons and concerned citizens queued up to say what everyone knew they were going to.

It seems that we have an infinite ability to bemoan what is happening in front of our eyes but are utterly powerless either to make the connections which might allow us to learn from such insights or take action to influence change. It is, of course, a good thing that nobody ever acts on the basis of what is said on talk radio, because what is said is often the worst form of "reaction to the immediacy of tragedy or outrage. Talk on radio is not like other talk. It does not explore things in a truthful manner but, tends to divide options into polar opposites. It avoids complexity and depth and refuses to make connections. If someone had attempted to make the very obvious, point that the shooting of Veronica Guerin was the inevitable consequence of, ideological choices made over three to four decades, they would have been shouted down for being "airy fairy". And yet it is ungainsayable that the criminality which today, infects our capital is the by product of a project of "modernisation" of which, on another day, our media, could spend hours in uncritical celebration. And so the inevitable consequence is followed by the even more inevitable orgy of further talking.

Talk radio is not what it seems. It does not add to our knowledge of the world but simply adds and adds to the amount of talk in the world. It is as though, having talked something to death, we decide that it has been adequately dealt with. And so we abandon one topic for the next, until some happening drags us back to the same conversation yet again. The recent announcement of schedule changes indicates that RTE managers have spotted a problem - but judging by the changes, they have not understood what that problem is.

On Thursday, Marian Finucane remarked on the nature of change in Ireland over the past 20 odd years. We have to decide as a society," she said "what we want done". But what we have to decide as a society is not what we want done" but whether or not we are ever going to do anything. What we do should not be the kind of thing you would hear suggested on daytime radio.

Somebody recently made an interesting observation to me about change. There had, he said, always been change but round about the beginning of the 1960s, something happened to change. Change changed. And that change, he reckoned, was that changes had ceased to be comprehensible at the level of the individual human perception. Before that, change was manageable, seeming to happen more or less in response to human desires and impulses. In the course of three decades or so, change had become something that happened to us.

A lot of this, I believe, may have to do with the nature of media, especially the talk which takes place on daytime radio. For 20 years now we have been sitting around trying to decide "what we want done". Every possible form of reactionary notion has been scrutinised at least a thousand times. And everything gets worse and worse in ways nobody could possibly have decided.