When I was born in 1922, there was one radio station offering broadcasts of music and news. That was station KDKA in Pittsburgh. You may recall that at that time there was no such thing as television. That remained in the never-never land of things to be yearned for.
When I was about 12 or 13 years of age, my older brother from time to time employed me as a babysitter to look over my infant nephew. My brother permitted me and a friend that I had invited over to listen to his radio. There was limited static to interfere with the reception on my brother’s radio. The reason my friend Gene Craig came with me was to listen as we pursued far away stations. As we put it, “Who could pull in stations as far away as Chicago?” – a distance of 300 miles. When we returned to school, we would brag about having listened to such things as the Glen Miller or the Jan Garber orchestras or Eddy Howard, all broadcasting directly from Chicago.
At that time and all through the years until 1950, the only way to stop listening to a broadcast was to turn the set off. Youngsters may express disbelief that in the early days of radio there was no such thing as a mute button. In point of fact, I will guarantee you that the only way a program could be interrupted was by changing stations or by turning the set off. In about 1950, television started its ascendancy. As time went forward, the only way to interrupt a broadcast was to change channels or to turn off the set. Then about 15 years ago the manufacturers of televisions and radios produced the mute button. May I assure you that the mute button is one of the great achievements of mankind?
Certainly this is true with the advent of cable stations other than the broadcasters of CBS, NBC, and ABC. There is a proliferation of cable stations. Some of these cable stations sell ads that run back to back so much so that I wonder which is the program and which are the ads.
It used to be in the early days of broadcasting that news consumed only 15 minutes which was uninterrupted by advertisers. Those days are long gone now. In these days of cable stations, there are many stations and interruptions that will tell you how you can become rich or how you can avoid taxation and there is one having to do with your love life. One commercial would have you believe that 20 seconds after a man takes a certain medication he will be ready to accommodate any female. The only way to handle this mélange of interruptions is through the mute button. How we lived without the mute button is a great mystery to me. As we go forward, I wish to sing a song of praise to the mute button. It saves me from countless hours of listening to commercials.
I suppose that I am a yesteryear person who appreciates the beauty of broadcasting largely free of commercial interruptions. The broadcasts that I heard over my brother’s radio from a ballroom in Chicago some 300 miles distant were wonderful things to hear. The big bands broadcast from at least two ballrooms in Chicago. There was the Aragon and the Trionon, and they had no commercial interruptions. This of course was in the days of the big bands. But today the intrusion of commercials is so great that we must have a mute button to turn them off. The wonderful thing is that the mute button will stop the transmission of commercials but it does not turn the set off.
So for that reason I propose a toast on this Christmas day to the mute button. I do not know how we have lived without it. Now that we have it, I propose that we keep the mute button as one of our national treasures.
E. E. CARR
December 25, 2012
Essay 727
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Kevin’s commentary: The closest that I can relate to this was my 2011 discovery of a browser extension called Adblock. However, while the mute button is pretty much pure good, there is a rather bad side to Adblock. You see it does not simply mute ads, it removes them from one’s web experience altogether. Youtube, web streams, and even Pandora radio just deliver pure content uninterrupted by ads. So, like the early days of Pop’s listening, listeners with Adblock may listen at length without having to keep a finger on the mute button.
The problem is that unlike the mute button, which simply blocks ads from bothering you, when adblock keeps you from seeing them at all… the advertisers know it. So all these services on the web that are offered for free (and are supported by ad revenue) don’t actually make any money from users who have Adblock. So by using it on the media you use most, you deprive your favorite sources of content from their revenue; so it is that the application’s usefulness and maliciousness scale together. Fortunately, even without Adblock most things still come equipped with the good old standard mute button.