...of media blackout

As a one-time classicist, I don't have to wonder what people did in ancient times. They met in small numbers. They discussed. They read. They wrote. Commentary would grow and grow as each civilisation declined. But before the electromagnetic waves that we discovered we could generate as support for words of every kind, at every level, in all languages, always the same words, the same images violent and venal and revered, thrown far further afield than they ever could have been in an amphitheatre or an agora, before all this, what did people do? They talked. And the greatest displacements of world consciousness were achieved not in public, on world-wide screens, but in solitude, against the familiar forms of the eternal commentary, filched and reaffixed, refurbished and floundered around.
And now, for more than a century, the eternal commentary weighs heavy upon the air, overloading the waves with tetravocal news bulletins like modern operas, fast rolling Spanish over crisp Serbocrat under pompous English inexorably heard behind the French or vice-quadriversa. Inexorable? Tim once said at a meeting, nonsense, exore it at once. Though he told me privately that radio-astronomers have long been protesting at the drastic reduction of their universe-scrutinising possibilities down to an ever-narrowing beam. But surely mere quantity, even if it can physically dip and twist the frequencies agonisingly out of shape - but that's a mere metaphor, Tim says - couldn't explain these sudden stops. Fused noises, yes, and atmospherics, but not silence, except from trouble at the transmitter, and not all transmitters in the world could so frequently and simultaneously be in trouble. And why aren't words being garbled as on a tape at the wrong speed, or scrambled? But no, just silence.
It is as if the world has suddenly come to the conclusion that from now on it must eat its words. As if man must eat his words, all of them.

[Verbivore, Brooke-Rose, C.]