Go outside, especially on a college campus, and you will see adherents of this philosophy. I have been guilty of it, and you probably have been, too. It could be the girl with the Apple earbuds or the guy sporting the garish purple or orange Beats. It's a socially acceptable security blanket. It's our 160 kbps collective woobie.
Ours may be the first generation to consider silence awkward. To some it's uncomfortable, and undesirable.
But it's not that silence is inherently undesirable or uncomfortable. People have been conditioned to accept endless bombardment of noise, and as digital has surpassed analog, the noise has reduced in quality. So we're not only getting more noise, but worse noise from more places.
The sounds of life give way to mp3s played through tin cans. Conversations are carried on while one earbud dangles from a hand eager to put it back in its proper place.
I want the earth to be my anthem, not a pop single. I want human voices to be my A-side, not carefully produced, vaguely sentimental faux-folk cacophony. The only soundtrack to my life is the one I make myself.
