Periodic corrections in this, the age of disruption, can be made known by the chorus assembled to identify and then disavow the outgroups who make them.
It’s an absolute of politics, increasingly economics and centralised modes of delivery.
Despite being mostly electronic, concentrations of media noise across the spectrum, especially since 2016, have become predictive, like a text function on a phone that will not be disabled.
Industrial noise exists because the demands of activity are such that they burden the machinery created to service it.
Grinding gears and fuming exhaust stacks, by way of comparison, a sure sign of equipment labouring in its final stages.
A consequence of heavy noise is that it dominates and deafens. Lessening its impact is not, by way of health, an endurable strategy.
One must either escape it or succumb. In earshot to prolonged industrial noise, a human becomes less so.
But the average factory these days would have better processes in place for loud outputs than what suffices at present under the media industrial complex where people thrust into the centre of a bulletin are reduced to names or subjects to unite against.
Working in B2B publishing might not sound like the place to find great examples of humanity but it certainly affords ample opportunities.
A great privilege of this job is in hearing people tell their stories. The how and why they did what they did or didn’t do. Some tell stories of triumphs.
Often, they are tales of survival, a triumph in itself. All of this can be imparted to me following a phone call or a simple handshake.
Sometimes the best stories get happened upon by accident.
An interview can and will go anywhere, even if there are topics tacitly understood for discussion or agreed upon guidelines imposed from the outset. I once called a wrong number and, by serendipity or dumb luck, got a story from it.
It’s great to talk to people who are at the coalface of where things are happening. These people tend to live outside of the bubble.
Then there are those people whose livelihoods are much more than jobs. They are vocations. Labours of love. They know what is important. They have no use for the noise.
It can be humbling to hear about past lives that are being celebrated by those who knew and loved them knowing the person you are writing about is no long around to see how much they were appreciated.
The legacy they leave behind can be found in some of their personal effects. The trucks they restored. The history they created. The things they helped build. The events that shaped them.
People can make important contributions to business and industry and community that there is no way of properly evaluating only until, it becomes clear in the final analysis, that they can no longer make them.
“Life can only be understood backwards,” as Søren Kierkegaard famously noted, “but it must be lived forwards.”
Preserving in print the memory of good people who have retired or passed on for their families, friends and close colleagues is one of the ongoing rewards of the job.
“What the movers and shakers are doing in the transport industry today is history tomorrow and that all needs to be represented,” Road Transport Hall of Famer Bob McMillan recently told me.
“History never stops being made.”
