The Signal to Noise Ratio

When I was a child in rural Ireland in the late 1960s one thing I learned very young was to shut up when adults were listening to the news, on TV or radio. Adults would listen attentively and without comment until the news was over. Then they would discuss the stories, both national and international. It was part of the ritual of daily life in that society.

My uncle told me a story about my maternal grandfather, a Cavan farmer. In 1937 my uncle asked him about the rising tensions between Japan and the USA. My grandfather had a very clear grasp of the strategic significance of the Japanese carrier fleet and its likely impact in any future war. As things turned out this Cavan farmer had a better grasp of the matter than the commander of the US Pacific fleet.

In modern Ireland we have access to a bewildering array of information, multiple radio channels, newspapers, twenty four hour news feeds and the internet. We have a much higher standard of education and yet many adults are so distracted by all the worthless noise that they have no idea what is going on in the world. As Neil Postman once wrote they are “amusing themselves to death”.

Until Irish television was launched in 1961 (a few months after this community first got mains electricity) news came from  the radio. Radio news went back to the mid 1920s. By the 1930s battery powered valve radios were common household items. To conserve power they were switched on for the news and then switched off. The only exception to this rule was when the Cavan football team were in a big match.

Radio batteries were imported into Ireland and the outbreak of the Battle of the Atlantic in September 1939 cut off the supply. A local man Patrick McCabe developed a radio battery and made them in a small workshop. His battery used a readily available sauce bottle to make the individual cells. He mounted a collection of cells in a shallow wooden box.

No one can tell me how he charged them but he must have had some kind of hand or pedal powered generator. It was primitive but it worked and it kept the communities radios working until 1945 when batteries were again available in the shops.

In the future we are going to need people like Patrick McCabe, creative technicians and mechanics to improvise things like batteries and keep essential communications systems running. Who knows what kind of communications we will be able to maintain in the coming decades but radio will almost certainly continue to play a key role.

I often wonder about the enormous amounts of energy consumed by the modern Internet, by the huge server farms that keep Facebook and YouTube running. When we are several decades past peak oil will we have the power to spare to run servers full of worthless photos and banal videos. Or will we have to scale back our communications systems and decide what is important information and what is useless noise.