Living and Learning in a World of ‘White Noise’: Technology, Youth, and the University

[논둑길맨발로]

► 8:05► 8:05

White Noise- Don Delillo - YouTube youtube.com2007년 8월 4일 - 8분 - 업로더: OrlandosPiratess This video is what I created for an assignment in my contemporary American literature class in response to ...

Living and Learning in a World of ‘White Noise’: Technology, Youth, and the University

Posted on September 19, 2012 by pipeditor

var addthis_product = 'wpp-264'; var addthis_config = {"data_track_clickback":true,"data_track_addressbar":false};if (typeof(addthis_share) == "undefined"){ addthis_share = [];}

By Jennifer Fisher

When Don DeLillo published White Noise in 1985, he wrote about a society whose proof of terminal decline could be found not in the range of man-made, technologically induced disasters it manufactured but, more critically, in how this perpetual state of crisis had come to eviscerate the formative conditions needed for young people to live and learn with little adult or academic intervention.  From a rampant culture of consumerism, the development of biological and techno-scientific weapons, and ecological catastrophes, to the growth of the “new media” and its attending “sound bite” culture of illiteracy, life for the young characters in DeLillo’s text prove precarious at best.  Yet in the university, where one might expect to find the merger between life and technology being critically deliberated, DeLillo offers the adverse and controversial image of a stagnant higher education system and professoriate whose apolitical discourses, disciplines, and research mandates refuse to speak to the broader public issues and bioethical dilemmas of a troubled landscape.  Portraying the university’s failure to provide a thoughtful or self-reflexive forum in which the thinning “progress” of society and the university’s role therein are recognized, let alone grappled with, DeLillo writes a world where “modernizing” developments and their often ruinous collateral effects – effects that, we should remember, are intimately tied to the research agendas and advancements generated through the university – are traded for the study of “personalities” and celebrity culture by academic society.[i]  Under such conditions, the disquieting noise produced by a contemporary state of living whose technological expansions have unevenly fashioned new states of risk and vulnerability for human and nonhuman life quickly finds itself dissipating into “white noise” in the absence of critical thought.

Both haunting and instructive, White Noise proves to be an important contemporary fiction for many reasons, but I would argue that two inquiries relevant for a non-fictitious present within the novel include: first, the question of how technology has reshaped the terms of living and learning for young people? And second, what ethical responsibility does the university and its faculties of intellectuals share in speaking to, and preparing students for, the problematic effects of what we might term “the biopolitics of technologization” as matters of life and death become increasingly rearranged by the digital and the virtual?

DeLillo’s narrative illustrates the dire consequences inflicted on young populations who live in a society not only increasingly “technosized” and automated but also one in which the university is divorced from addressing historical concerns that are real world, embodied, and material.  And here, DeLillo’s focus on the profound costs of this division, and of a university that fails to employ a capacity for thinking responsibly and acting responsively towards children and youth whose worlds have become differentially marked by disaster, reflects in some sense how a crisis of the social correlates with a crisis of education.

White Noise is evidence of a pointedly dystopian image of the university, to be sure, but it raises important questions surrounding what can happen socially, politically, and culturally when the university and its conditions for thought are in a state of “ruin.”[ii]  White Noise also inspires reflection on how the university has been reformed by technology in recent years – its modes of research, experimentation, instituted fields and pedagogical approaches – while highlighting a crucial challenge.  In the future, the democratic role of the university as a discerning and dissenting public sphere will be contingent upon its operation as a collaborative interdisciplinary space whose gathering of intellectuals share perhaps only one thing in common: namely, an ethical and political commitment to addressing the public concerns and social problems of those made vulnerable, like young people, by the varying impact of technology in everyday life.  On this point, the renewal of commitment to both youth and thought within the university is a particularly important project to recall – all the more so given how, as Richard Powers reminds us, White Noise was written at a time when the reconfiguration of living and learning by technology was in a stage of infancy compared to the permeation that seems “ordinary” to the bulk of young people today: “If you thought the world was awash in noise then, half a decade before the first Web browser, just put your ear to today’s Twitter.”[iii]

Indeed, in North American countries like the United States and Canada, technology has become the primary force that mediates how young people learn, socialize, play, communicate and develop a sense of identity.  Taking into account a wide range of media use including computer ownership, Internet access, mobile devices, television and other information communication technologies (ICTs), the Kaiser Foundation’s Generation M2 report found that the vast majority of young people between the ages of 8 and 18 are spending 7.5 hours on average with media a day, seven days a week.  When factors of multiple media use are included, researchers conducting the Generation M2 study discovered that youth are packing the whopping equivalent of over 10 hours of media engagement into their 7.5 hours of daily media consumption.[iv]

To say the least, children and youth are experiencing a fundamental redefinition of the world as private and public spaces formerly separated, like that of home and school, are increasingly blurred by the intrusion of new technologies.  They are also experiencing what it means to “be in the world” – a phrase that indexes the changing nature of their existence, realities, and relations to others – in terms that are profoundly different than those of the “Silent” or “Babyboomer” generation.  Social networking sites, like Facebook and MySpace, have become the principal means of representing or extending a sense of self in virtual times, terms, and spaces.  And as reports from universities and research centers like Generation M2 continue to be published, signaling the vast degree to which “being online” has now become a “new normal” for most young people – or at least a privileged majority – public and scholarly discussions debating the implications of such shifts have abounded, but not in ways that would warrant any praise for their criticality.

The kinds of scholarly responses that have emerged from the university following the growth of digital technologies and their impact on youth include a wide range of competing interpretations, many of which I cannot cover here.[v]  Some scholars at one pole of the debate adopt a fairly conservative and deterministic position, like that of Mark Bauerlein, who sees the increased use of information communication technologies among youth in the U.S. to be responsible for producing what he calls “the dumbest generation”:  that is, a cohort of illiterate, anti-intellectual, isolated, self-obsessed young people who have no interest or understanding of the histories, politics, or cultures of the societies in which they live despite, ironically, having more access to information through ICT forums like the Internet than any generation prior.[vi]  Others, like Marc Prensky, have offered in the opposite extreme a much more romanticized and utopic vision that suggests youth universally represent a new generation of “digital natives”: that is, a cohort of students who are literate, intellectual, connected, publically minded, sociable, and contributing members of digital worlds.[vii]

While these positions appear to be in complete opposition, both of them depend on an unquestioned adoption of ICTs, and specifically that of the Internet, as well as a superficial discussion of technology in relation to youth that I find most egregious.  Despite their contrasting views of youth and the effects of technology, Bauerlein’s and Prensky’s positions prove to be two sides of the same coin.  In equal measure, both authors reflect support for a neoliberal interpretation of information communication technologies by framing spaces like the Internet as one of unrestrained “freedom,” “personal choice,” and “equal opportunity” where youth as disembodied subjects can leave, at least temporarily, the weight of their socio-economic and bodily realities behind (including one’s race, class, and gender) to learn as “digital natives” (in Prensky’s terms) or to avoid these seemingly available and open opportunities to learn, choosing to become “dumb” instead (in Bauerlein’s estimations).

Departing from these positions, I would insist that universities and the variety of public scholars they host have a responsibility to reframe the discussion of digitization and technology by including, first, a more capacious and historical understanding that counters neoliberal rationalities and interpretations of ICT developments as a liberalizing or democratizing force that can independently alleviate and equalize conditions of inequality.  And second, greater attention must be paid to the question of how new media technologies can reflect, reinforce, and even intensify real world, historical, embodied disparities among diverse populations of youth.

Such lines of inquiry have, of course, found support in debates over what is most commonly referred to as the “digital divide” – an area of scholarly study that has long brought critical attention to issues of social inequality in relation to technology, especially in discussions of access, service distribution, and more recently that of literacy.[viii]  But the rhetorical deployment of the term “digital divide” and its attending focus on technological “haves and have-nots,” and even that of literacy and the cultivation of media skills, as Anna Everett rightly suggests, often fall short in paying attention to the more malleable ways in which ICTs not only have perpetuated gender, racial, and class “fault lines in our information age, but have [also] introduced new…divides and novel strategies” for managing different bodies of youth.[ix]  How, then, might the university play a crucial role in rethinking technology as a series of developments situated within a broader ecology of history, power, and culture?  And if, in some cases, it can result in the invention and deepening of social divisions, how must technology be rethought in order to resist the bifurcation of its effects from being naturalized as “white noise” today?

The challenge that DeLillo poses to the university centers, in my reading of White Noise, on this set of concerns.  The university, its faculty, and students have a crucial role to play in thinking critically about the advent of technology as something historical, political, and deeply rooted in a question of ethics.  Contemporary conditions of economic austerity, hollowed out social resources, and mounting global insecurity have left few spaces for young people to create and engage in the kinds of “participatory cultures” so celebrated in research on “digital living” within real world, everyday, embodied conditions.[x]  As researchers and public intellectuals, we commit a disservice when we fail to connect how the increasing number of children and youth moving online is partially linked to the wider collapse of spaces for play, pedagogy, and political engagement in offline environments, the proof of which is not hard to find.

We see it in reports suggesting that black and Hispanic youth in the U.S. spend up to four hours more with ICTs than white youth[xi] – a troubling statistic given that these increased levels of media use are, as one can imagine, intimately tied to conditions of poverty, a lack of safe and supportive spaces for play, and a public education system so disparate in the distribution of its resources and quality that ICTs must stand in for any number of care, funding, and pedagogical absences.  We also see it in reports suggesting that poor minority youth are more likely than white youth to have media used at home by parents – many of whom raise children independently, are required to work more than one job to secure a basic means of survival, and cannot access affordable “childcare,” let alone balance the cost of enrolling their kids in recreational activities – as a pragmatic measure to occupy the attention of their children while tending to household duties for example, or to provide safe forms of entertainment to their children when other spaces and resources are lacking.[xii]  The real and embodied effects of these differences find expression‎ in the increased levels of depression and lower grade results that the heaviest media users have been found to experience.[xiii]

So too, we can see deepening divides in examples of cyberbullying where digital spaces prove to be far from neutral, tolerant, or “colourblind,” functioning instead as a conduit that augments some of the worst social sentiments of racism, sexism, and homophobia.  And we see how, through virtual environments, children and youth are increasingly subject to a number of neoliberal intensifications rather than alleviations – commodification, individualization, and surveillance – through techniques of online commercial marketing deployed at children and individualized “personal” profile networking sites like Facebook, which are also coupled with new opportunities for monitoring and regulating young people.  What concerns me, in short, is how celebratory rhetorics of “freedom,” “disembodiedness,” and declarations claiming a “post-human” age as a result of information communication technologies from scholars within the academy risk ignoring and lending support to a much broader retraction of civil liberties, social resources, and public spaces elsewhere as neoliberal policy grows in popularity and practice.

To advocate for a greater focus on the relationship between online and offline environments is not to suggest that all technology operates deterministically, nor does it aim to simplify the varying dimensions and complicated properties of the merger between life and technology.  Without a doubt, children and youth are collaborating, creating, and reappropriating established structures of power through ICTs in ways that are creative, political, and profoundly pedagogical – as movements like the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and Quebec student protest can attest.  The critical use of media and technology demonstrates how they have quickly become a central tool for advocacy and protest within highly different global contexts, providing a few select examples of their productive and imaginative role in public life.  Even in a novel whose vision of society appears terribly bleak, like that of White Noise, DeLillo leaves hope for a better future with his young characters who prove to be critical, aware, and interpretive in their engagements with technology and its attending disasters.  Yet the more central question those in the university must grapple with, as Henry Giroux succinctly suggests, involves how we want to “imagine the new media and their underlying communication systems as contributing to a distinctly different public sphere that offers the promise of recasting modes of agency and politics outside of the neoliberal ideology and disciplinary apparatus that now dominate the contemporary culture?”[xiv]  Such a task, in my estimation, begins by developing collaborative and interdisciplinary modes of research and teaching in the university dedicated to countering neoliberalism’s diminishment of digital life and its implications for the young to mere “white noise.”

______________
Jennifer Fisher is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

NOTES

[i] DeLillo’s use of two academic characters in White Noise – Jack, who claims to have pioneered a specialized field studying the life and personality of Hitler (all without any reference to the Holocaust), and Murray, who centers his research around the biography of Elvis Presley – may read in some quarters as a rather conservative critique against scholarly work emerging from the Humanities, particularly in the field of Cultural Studies.  But DeLillo’s focus on the “cult of celebrity” and personality, at least in my reading, is not intended to disavow the importance of studying political persons or icons of popular culture within humanistic areas of research.  Rather, through the characters of Jack and Murray, DeLillo challenges the privatization of scholarly work whose responsibility to address public issues, social concerns, and historical predicaments is evacuated when research becomes reduced to the depoliticized and dehistoricized study of “persona.”

[ii] Readings, Bill.  The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1996).

[iii] DeLillo, Don.  White Noise.  Introduction by Richard Powers  (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), pp. xiv.

[iv] Kaiser Family Foundation. Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8-to18 Year Olds  (January, 2010), pp. 1.

[v] Some accounts on youth, technology, and “new media” that offer more nuanced and critical readings include:  David Buckingham,  After the Death of Childhood: Growing Up in the Age of Electronic Media (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Inc, 2000); Kathryn C. Montgomery,  Generation Digital: Politics, Commerce, and Childhood in the Age of the Internet (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2007); Sherry Turkle,  Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York, New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 1995); Henry A. Giroux,  Channel Surfing: Racism, the Media, and the Deconstruction of Today’s Youth (New York, New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998).

[vi] Bauerlein, Mark.  The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future  (New York, New York: Penguin Group Inc, 2008), pp. 32.

[vii] Prensky, Marc.  “digital natives, digital immigrants.”  The Digital Divide: Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting and the Age of Social Networking.  Mark Bauerlein (Ed).  (New York, New York: Penguin Books, 2011), pp. 4.

[viii] For an excellent study on Canadian digital divides and the changing nature of digital divide debates, please see:  Digital Diversity: Youth, Equity, and Information Technology.  E. Dianne Looker and Ted D. Naylor (Eds).  (Waterloo, Ontario, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2010).

[ix] Everett, Anna.  “Introduction.”  Learning Race and Ethnicity: Youth and Digital Media.  Anna Everett (Ed).  The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning  (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2008), pp. 4.

[x] Jenkins, Henry and Ravi Purushtoma, et al.  Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21^st Century.  The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation  (London, England: The MIT Press, 2009).  It is important to note that Jenkins is acutely aware of the way historical conditions come to limit possibilities for participation. What interests me is how the uncritical reappropriation of terms like “participatory culture” in scholarly work can become quickly aligned with a neoliberal interpretation of ICTs as tools that create opportunities and spaces for free, unrestrained association.

[xi] Kaiser Family Foundation. Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8-to18 Year Olds  (January, 2010), pp. 11.

[xii] Kaiser Family Foundation.  The Media Family: Electronic Media in the Lives of Infants, Toddlers, Preschoolers and their Parents (May 2006), pp. 28-33.

[xiii] Kaiser Family Foundation. Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8-to18 Year Olds  (January, 2010), pp. 4.

[xiv] Giroux, Henry A.  “The Crisis of Public Values in the Age of New Media.”  Twilight of the Social: Resurgent Publics in the Age of Disposability (Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm Publishers, 2012), pp. 76.

http://publicintellectualsproject.mcmaster.ca/education/living-and-learning-in-a-world-of-white-noise-technology-youth-and-the-university/

'White Noise,' by Don DeLillo

Review by JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS

Published: January 13, 1985

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Google+
• E-mail
• Share
• Print
• Reprints
• 

-->

--> --> -->

The fiction of Don DeLillo is no longer the well-kept secret of a dedicated following. In such novels as ''Ratner's Star,'' ''Great Jones Street'' and ''The Names,'' Mr. DeLillo has dealt not so much with character as with culture, survival and the subtle, ever-increasing interdependence between the self and the national and world community. The he-man against the elements, the outlaw, the superhero exist only as myths in the modern world; we are nature's elements, a technologically oriented people nonetheless caught in the sieve of history. There are suspense and an urgent intelligence to Mr. DeLillo's writing, a sense of the widening gyre and the tight-drawn net. ''White Noise,'' his eighth novel, is the story of a college professor and his family whose small Midwestern town is evacuated after an industrial accident. In light of the recent Union Carbide disaster in India that killed over 2,000 and injured thousands more, ''White Noise'' seems all the more timely and frightening - precisely because of its totally American concerns, its rendering of a particularly American numbness.

The novel opens with the September 1st arrival of students at the aforementioned college. Like a reductive version of the Conestoga wagon trains of old, station wagons ''arrive in a long shining line.'' Laden with stereos, radios, personal computers, hair-dryers and hair-styling irons rather than the tools of physical survival, the station wagons disgorge young pioneers who feed on Kabooms and Dum-Dum pops, Waffelos and Mystic mints. The mothers are ''crisp and alert,'' the fathers ''distant but ungrudging.''

''This assembly, . . . more than formal liturgies or laws, tells the parents they are . . . a nation,'' observes Jack Gladney, professionally known as J. A. K. Gladney, a professor of Hitler studies at the College-on-the- Hill and the originator of Hitler studies in North America. An evening in front of the television set moves Gladney to ''read deeply in Hitler well into the night.'' The voice guiding us through ''White Noise'' is Gladney's, and it is one of the most ironic, intelligent, grimly funny voices yet to comment on life in present-day America.

THIS is an America where no one is responsible or in control; all are receptors, receivers of stimuli, consumers. Some join Simuvac, which signs up local school children as volunteer victims in simulated evacuations (''Some people,'' Gladney tells his daughter in response to a question about the Nazis, ''put on a uniform and feel bigger, stronger, safer''). Gladney and his wife, Babette, live with four of the children of their previous marriages in a rambling house filled with ''possessions that carry a sorrowful weight . . . the unused objects of earlier marriages, gifts of lost in-laws,'' things that have ''a darkness attached to them, a foreboding.'' Babette, a low-key and adaptable faculty wife who reads tabloids to the blind and teaches senior citizens' classes in posture, is distinguished by her forgetfulness and her preoccupation with death.

Their son Heinrich (Gladney, who wanted to ''shield him, make him unafraid,'' thought the German name ''had an authority that might cling to him'') is 14, moody and introspective. His hairline is already receding. He exchanges chess moves through the mail with an imprisoned mass murderer and has little faith in the self-determination of human beings. ''How can I be sure what I want. . . . It's all this activity in the brain and you don't know what's you and what's some neuron that just happens to fire. . . . Isn't that why Tommy Roy killed those people?''

Their daughter Denise is 11, a ''hard-nosed kid'' who leads ''a more or less daily protest against parental habits that she considers wasteful or dangerous.'' She points out the warning on her mother's packages of sugarless gum and is the first to notice Babette's surreptitious consumption of a drug called Dylar, which Denise finds is unlisted in her much perused copy of the Physician's Desk Reference. Steffie is slightly younger than Denise, a sensitive child who, while watching television with her family, ''becomes upset when something shameful or humiliating seems about to happen to someone on the screen'' and stands outside the room while Denise gives a running commentary on the action. And there is Wilder, the 3-year-old son who seldom speaks but, asleep or awake, is a constant reassurance to his parents, simply because he is there.

Children, in the America of ''White Noise,'' are in general more competent, more watchful, more in sync than their parents; emotionally, they constitute a kind of early-warning system. The novel's first short section informs us that ''homemade signs concerning lost dogs and cats are posted on telephone poles all over town'' - signs often handwritten by children. Indeed, the children seem the only ones still attuned enough to the natural world to be concerned about dogs and cats. But children are not merely guardians of the heart; they are the targeted audience, the frequency to which the advertising industry and the vast construct of the media are tuned. The professors at the College-on-the Hill speak of a ''society of kids'' and tell their students they are ''already too old to figure importantly in the making of society. . . . It is only a matter of time before you experience the vast loneliness and dissatisfaction of consumers who have lost their group identity.''

Group identity is a ''white noise'' in itself, the white noise of history. ''Crowds came to hear Hitler speak,'' Gladney points out in his classes, ''crowds erotically charged, the masses he once called his only bride. . . . There must have been something different about those crowds. What was it? . . . Death. Crowds came to form a shield . . . to become a crowd is to keep out death.'' Academia is trying, too; Hitler studies shares a building with the popular culture department, officially known as American environments, ''an Aristotelianism of bubble gum wrappers and detergent jingles.'' Murray J. Siskind, a shining, somewhat shunned star of the department, is a former sportswriter from New York who studies American culture with the doomed glee of a Dr. Strangelove and the reverence of a Buddhist monk. ''You've established a wonderful thing here with Hitler,'' he tells Gladney. ''You created it, you nurtured it. . . . He is now your Hitler. I marvel at the effort. It was masterful, shrewd and stunningly preemptive. It's what I want to do with Elvis.'' If white noise heralds death, Murray maintains, it also hints at the secrets of the (technologically transformed) universe, a modern music of the spheres.

''White Noise'' finds its greatest distinction in its understanding and perception of America's soundtrack. White noise includes the ever-present sound of expressway traffic, ''a remote and steady murmur around our sleep, as of dead souls babbling at the edge of a dream.'' Television is ''the primal force in the American home, sealed-off, self-contained, self-referring . . . a wealth of data concealed in the grid, in the bright packaging, the jingles, the slice-of-life commercials, the products hurtling out of darkness, the coded messages . . . like chants. . . . Coke is it, Coke is it, Coke is it.'' Television, Murray Siskind asserts, ''practically overflows with sacred formulas.'' White noise includes the bold print of tabloids, those amalgams of American magic and dread, with their comforting ''mechanism of offering a hopeful twist to apocalyptic events.'' Fast food and quad cinemas contribute to the melody, as do automated teller machines. Nowhere is Mr. DeLillo's take on the endlessly distorted, religious underside of American consumerism better illustrated than in the passage on supermarkets.

Jack Gladney: ''Everything seemed to be in season, sprayed, burnished, bright. . . . The place was awash in noise. . . . The toneless systems, the jangle and skid of carts, the loudspeaker and the coffee-making machines, the cries of children. And over it all . . . a dull and unlocatable roar, as of some form of swarming life just outside the range of human apprehension.''

Murray Siskind: ''Everything is concealed in symbolism. . . . The large doors slide open, they close unbidden. Energy waves, incident radiation . . . code words and ceremonial phrases. It is just a question of deciphering. . . . Not that we would want to. . . . This is not Tibet. . . . Tibetans try to see death for what it is. It is the end of attachment to things. This simple truth is hard to fathom. But once we stop denying death, we can proceed calmly to die. . . . We don't have to cling to life artificially, or to death. . . . We simply walk toward the sliding doors. . . . Look how well-lighted everything is . . . sealed off . . . timeless. Another reason why I think of Tibet. Dying is an art in Tibet . . . Chants, numerology, horoscopes, recitations. Here we don't die, we shop. But the difference is less marked than you think.''

AMERICANS in ''White Noise'' do well to study their supermarkets closely, since death is edging nearer, anonymous, technical, ironically group-oriented. Menacing signs appear - reports of various toxic waste disasters are broadcast frequently; the local grade school is evacuated (''Investigators said it could be the ventilating system, the paint or varnish, the foam insulation, the rays emitted by microcomputers''), and a man dies during the inspection of a second-floor classroom.

Finally, after ''a night of dream-lit snows,'' an ''airborne toxic event'' originates in a rail accident at a nearby train yard. The dark billowing cloud is full of Nyodene D, a chemical familiar to Heinrich (''It was in a movie we saw in school on toxic wastes. These videotaped rats''). The radio quotes a series of symptoms ranging from sweaty palms to dej a vu (''Death in the air,'' Murray explains, ''liberates suppressed material'') to coma. ''I'm the head of a department,'' Gladney tells Heinrich, ''I don't see myself fleeing an airborne toxic event. That's for people who live in mobile homes out in the scrubby parts of the county, where the fish hatcheries are.''

Nevertheless, Gladney finds himself joining an exodus familiar from disaster movies, directed by amplified voices over loudspeakers. Cars crawl toward a Boy Scout barracks in a heavy snowfall, creating a third lane on the grassy incline at the edge of the expressway. Other evacuees walk (''There was a family completely in plastic, a single large sheet of transparent polyethylene. They walked beneath their shield in lock step''). Gladney gets out of the car to pump gas and sees the event itself - lighted by the search beams of helicopters - passing over columns of cars ''like some death ship in a Norse legend, escorted across the night by armored creatures with spiral wings.''

Later, at the barracks, Simuvac is in operation. ''Are you saying you saw a chance to use the real event in order to rehearse the simulation?'' Gladney asks. ''You have to make allowances for the fact that everything we see tonight is real,'' the worker agrees. ''But that's what this exercise is all about.'' Gladney is asking for reassurance about his two-minute exposure to the cloud and is told he is ''generating big numbers . . . your whole data profile. I tapped into your history. I'm getting bracketed numbers with pulsing stars. . . .''

''Am I going to die? . . .''

''Not in so many words.''

''How many words does it take?''

''It's not a question of words. It's a question of years. We'll know in fifteen years. In the meantime we definitely have a situation. . . . I wouldn't worry. . . . I'd go ahead and live my life. . . .''

''But you said we have a situation.''

''I didn't say it. The computer did. . . .''

''It's like we've been flung back in time,'' Heinrich says of the barracks. ''Name one thing you could make. . . . We think we're so great and modern. . . . Could you rub flints together? Would you know a flint if you saw one? . . . What is a nucleotide? You don't know, do you? . . . What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air? It goes from computer to computer. . . . But nobody acutally knows anything.''

After nine days, the Gladneys return home. Normalcy resumes. Men in protective suits and German shepherd dogs ''trained to sniff out toxic material'' patrol the town. Sunsets last for hours; silent crowds watch the spectacular colors from overpasses. Gladney secretly visits a think tank diagnostic center that confirm‎s the presence of Nyodene D in his blood.

Babette admits to taking Dylar, moved by her constant anxieties to answering a tabloid ad: ''Fear of Death? Volunteers wanted for secret research.'' Following test after test, she is judged one of three most fearful finalists, but the ''small firm doing research in psychobiology'' decides not to use human subjects. Desperate, Babette makes a private arrangement with the project manager, a shadowy figure she will reveal to Gladney only as ''Mr. Gray.'' For several months, she has met him in a motel room, offering herself (''It was a capitalist transaction'') in exchange for drugs.

Gladney, ''scheduled to die'' himself, is moved equally by rage and fear. He tells Babette he wishes to contact Gray only to get Dylar. In fact, he evolves a plan to kill Gray, and the book reaches its least convincing twist with a comic near-murder. Gladney takes his victim to a hospital and has a conversation about belief with a nun called Sister Hermann Marie: ''You don't believe in heaven?'' he asks. ''Your dedication is a pretense?'' ''Our presence is a dedication,'' she responds. ''As belief shrinks from the world, people find it more necessary than ever that someone believe . . . Nuns in black. . . . Fools, children. We surrender our lives to make your nonbelief possible. . . . There is no truth without fools.'' ''I don't want to hear this,'' Gladney protests. ''This is terrible.'' ''But true,'' she answers.

''WHAT good is my truth?'' Heinrich asks Gladney early in the novel. ''My truth means nothing. . . . Is there such a thing as now? 'Now' comes and goes as soon as you say it.'' Babette has observed of her husband that it is his nature ''to shelter loved ones from the truth. Something lurked inside the truth.'' It is in documenting such epidemic evasiveness and apprehension, such lack of connection to the natural world and to technology, such bewilderment, that ''White Noise'' succeeds so brilliantly. ''The nature of modern death is that it has a life independent of us,'' Mr. DeLillo asserts. This truth, in itself, has indeed forever altered ''man's guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood.'' What belief can correspond to a fact so irrevocable? ''White Noise'' offers no answers, but it poses inescapable questions with consummate skill.

'I NEVER SET OUT TO WRITE AN APOCALYPTIC NOVEL'

''I thought of a college that had a department of Hitler studies and that led to death as a subject,'' Don DeLillo says in describing the origin of ''White Noise.'' Talking by phone from his home just outside New York City, he is matter-of-fact. ''I haven't a clue where that thought came from, but it seemed innately comic, and everything sprang from it. I never felt that I was writing a comic novel before 'White Noise.' Maybe the fact that death permeates the book made me retreat into comedy.'' Despite the shadow of Hitler and the topical issue of disastrous toxic leaks, Mr. DeLillo says his novel is about prosaic events - the anxieties and mysteries that infuse daily life. ''I never set out to write an apocalyptic novel. It's about death on the individual level. Only Hitler is large enough and terrible enough to absorb and neutralize Jack Gladney's obsessive fear of dying - a very common fear, but one that's rarely talked about. Jack uses Hitler as a protective device; he wants to grasp anything he can.'' The conjunction of the apocalyptic and the ordinary may be most evident in the character of Murray J. Siskind, who, Mr. De Lillo says, finds the supermarket ''very rich in magic and dread; it's a kind of church. Perhaps the supermarket tabloids are the richest material of all, closest to the spirit of the book. They ask profoundly important questions about death, the afterlife, God, worlds and space, yet they exist in an almost Pop Art atmosphere.'' Everyday mysteries are embodied in the book's children as well. ''They are a form of magic. The adults are mystified by all the data that flows through their lives, but the children carry the data and absorb it most deeply. They give family life a buzz and hum; it's almost another form of white noise,'' Mr. DeLillo says. Although he has no children, he denies that their real-life absence influenced his decision to ''populate'' ''White Noise'' with them. ''There's very little autobiography in my books,'' he says. Mr. DeLillo is working on a new novel, but when asked to talk about it, his reply is characteristically understated: ''My lips are sealed.''

http://www.nytimes.com/1985/01/13/books/delillo-noise.html?pagewanted=all