On Noise

I was driving in my car back from St. Louis to go to my house in Columbia and I was listening to the radio, Z1077, although I guess in reality I was just listening to commercials. It took me until the end of the commercial break on the radio, about 5 minutes of driving maybe less but definitely more than 2, for me to realize I had been listening to commercials and not actually music. I came to a conclusion at that moment: my generation, the "net generation" isn't a generation that just enjoys all these different styles of music, the rap/rock/screamo, it's a generation that simply enjoys noise in the background.

Perhaps it is just me, others from my generation may refute this post, but I feel as though my age tunes out what they are actually listening to as they do to parents or even girlfriends and other loved ones, we aren't listening to words, we are listening to noise. I enjoy music, I always have to have the radio on when I'm driving, but when it comes to a long drive, I apparently can listen to commercials and not even realize it, not even try to find another station playing music.

In studying the net generation for my Contemporary Issues and Mass Media Theories course, I've been thinking a lot about the different generations, and most importantly my generation, the "net generation." I feel like noise is a major part of it. We use television as a background noise for doing homework, we listen to our iPod during test. It's not necessarily the words but the noise that interest us.