Signal Over Static

Hi {{first_name}} - Short and sweet for you this week! Because every once in a while that’s what both of us need ;)

Our kids will never fully appreciate the experience of rotating the tuner dial on a radio and watching the thin marker creep left or right along the broadcast band in search of music. The space between 87.5 to 108 MHz was mysterious and finicky. But when that crisp signal finally cut through the static, there was always a moment of joy and excitement. (To be clear, by the time I was in high school, digital tuners had become the standard. But as I child, I recall with clarity the analogue versions that preceded them.)

Once, when my brothers and I were young and riding in the back seat along an Indiana highway, I remember dad told us to watch what would happen as we crossed by a field of broadcast towers. It was night time and we could see the red lights stacked high into the sky on four or five of them clustered together in a clearing.

As we came even with them, the music in the car started getting louder and louder. Our gaze was fixed out the window, impressed with the fact that he had predicted this anomaly. But then I looked down and saw he was just inconspicuously nudging the volume dial with his thumb and grinning.

Simpler times, am I right?

Our kids today would likely try and compare dialing in a radio signal to getting on WiFi. But man, how different those two things truly are. When you latched on to 97.3fm, you got a single song at a time. Jump on wifi now and you get a face melting number of options to pick from immediately.

The distinction between signal and static has grown overwhelming and confusing most days. The technology is so reliable and ever-present, we live in perpetual signal if we’re not constantly working to filter out the static.

The need to improve our self-tuning is growing. Every “station” is optimized and working against us with highly researched and honed psychological tactics, trying to convince us they’re where we should set the dial. After starting with social media, it's spread through every app, software platform, and interface. Static, screaming and fighting for our attention, masquerading as signal.

Right now in Florida it’s cicada season again. Sitting outside reading a book can be interrupted without notice by the chorus of buzzing that rises from the trees at decibel levels hard to believe can come from insects. The metaphor they offer to our digital environment is a little too on the nose.

But then occasionally, the call or song of a bird immediately cuts through the droning. A tufted titmouse for instance, will draw my conscious attention with its high pitched, pleasant chirp at a moments notice. (Thanks to my wife the bird nerd, I’m starting to enjoy these signals by name.) And just like in nature, I think we can have similar clarity when we commit to it.

Maybe it starts with silence. Sweet, sweet, blissful silence. Once everything is removed, it becomes easier to add things back one at a time. Then we can recognize each one for what it is as it's reintroduced. I've done it with social media, apps, WhatsApp threads, email subscriptions, etc. with decent results. But it's not a one and done practice, clearly. This new normal requires us to be ever present, constantly aware of when we need to move the dial. There are apps like Brick and "dumb devices" like Litephone available now. I applaud them for sure, but I'm trying to be even more intentional by making the changes natively and cognitively.

The twist to this I have to acknowledge is being someone who sits on the creator side of the equation too. As builders and makers who are sending our own broadcast, what are we doing to ensure that we are distributing signal rather than static?

We've all subscribed to or witnessed the well intentioned, but obviously AI created content sequences or feeds. I've been caught in the temptation to do more, faster, and bigger since the tools make it so easy. But for better or worse, I've decided to err on the side of slow and intentional. That's why this email typically finds its way to completion just before I hit send each week.

I hope it comes through that way, and that the sometimes imperfect humanity is worth it. My growing desire is to be meaningful, effective, and connected, even if at a smaller scale than what we're trained for and expected to have.

If you're having observations or making changes in your approach to separating the two, I'd love to hear about it!

-Justin