People my age have been known to gripe about the dehumanizing effects of technology. There’s some truth to this—communication via phone and email often is limited to a few capital letters that stand in for emotions, and Facebook at times is akin to that Main Street telephone pole papered over with stapled notices.
No one writes letters any more, at least not the kind that reveal intimate thoughts, the kind that Ken Burns might pan slowly across in a documentary. Will the collected emails of George W. Bush or Barack Obama some day fill out an engaging book, giving a thoughtful historian insight into their times? It’s hard to say.
Blaming technology for the brevity and lack of reflection in communication is not the right response. To paraphrase Alexis de Tocqueville (and thank you, Wikiquote), we get not only the technology we deserve, but the technology that matches our cultural desires and values.
I was thinking of this on a perfect July evening while sitting in the Swan’s Island Odd Fellows Hall, listening to digitally recorded audio documentaries from islanders, past and present. It was an event put together by the island’s historical society and co-hosted by Donna Wiegle and Kate Webber, the Island Institute’s AmeriCorps Island Fellow.
In her nearly two years on the island, Webber (who wrote the “There Was a Time”¦” column for the paper) has interviewed 33 people about their recollections on island life. Their voices (isn’t amazing how little our voices change over the years?), their inflections, laughter, sighs, all were captured on the digital recorder and faithfully reproduced.
The interviews—stories, really—played that night (some produced and recorded by Wiegle and former Island Fellow Meghan Vigeant, as well as by Webber) made for a nice mix.
Donnie Carlson talked about building lobster traps. Wesley Staples II recounted his love of books and how it led to the creation of a new island library (actually, the “Swan’s Island Educational Society,” lest the island lose its eligibility to have book mobile visits).
The odd way Fiberglas was introduced to the island by summer residents Bill and Billie Coleman got the most laughs. The Colemans recounted in the recording the line of vehicles outside their island house, as locals eagerly queued up not to inquire about this new method of building boat hulls, but to learn how to patch up their rusty pickups.
Dorothy Stockbridge, in an interview produced by Wiegle, talked about running the Seabreeze Restaurant—hard work, pride in what she made, growing to cherish the relationships she developed with her customers, all reflected a rare but humble grit.
Two written pieces also were on the program. One, from 1970, written by Hilda (Bailey) Dewsnap, recounted visiting the island early in the 20th century. Though beautifully read that evening by Paula McKay, it left me wondering how Hilda’ voice might have sounded.
Journalists are interpreters, translators. We pick the highlights of an interview or a conversation and craft them into a story, often around a unifying theme. It’s refreshing when the interviewer gets out of the way and lets the subject speak in his or her own voice, as was done here.
Of course, the journalist’s touch is still there in the unheard questions and the unseen editing, but there’s something closer to pure storytelling in these recordings. I suppose this is why public radio programs like “This American Life” and “The Moth Radio Hour” are so popular.
When I began my career in journalism 25 years ago, VHS video cameras had just become affordable. I kick myself for not using one as I interviewed survivors of Pearl Harbor, D-Day, the invasion of Italy, the Chosin Reservoir campaign in Korea, Vietnam. The presence of a camera might have changed the nature of those conversations, but maybe not.
It doesn’t seem to have been the case with the presence of an audio recorder, though I credit Wiegle and Webber, who no-doubt brought a gentle but deft touch to their conversations, given the relaxed, unguarded way the islanders told their stories.
In the case of several of those 15 or so interviews of veterans I had the privilege of conducting, family members came to me after the stories were published and said they’d learned things their father or husband had never before shared. That’s another side of journalism, as people sort of accept as a responsibility, when a reporter asks them, that they’ve got to tell their story to a larger community.
As my wife and I left the Odd Fellows Hall, we talked about who would come next in the continuing march of time. The young lobstermen cruising by us in their pickup and the young woman selling produce at a roadside farm stand may someday be telling an audience, via a recording, what it was like in those days of the early 21st century.
Tom Groening is editor of The Working Waterfront.