Chances are, unless you've ever been alone in a radio booth, you have never experienced complete silence. I've had the privilege a number of times in the last few years, and have come to savor it. Whenever I'm scheduled to record a commentary or defend my point of view on a talk show, I try to show up a few minutes early just to bathe in the silence of the studio. Radio booths are generally cramped and are rarely much to look at-ratty carpet, corrugated walls (designed to nullify all sound waves coming from whatever angle), soft creakless chairs. But the stillness lends a cathedral-like quality. An unnatural calm slows down time. You can hear your own breath.

Of course, no one listens to radio in that kind of cocoon. We turn it on in the car, the backyard, the kitchen. But the silence of a radio booth says something important about the nature of the medium. As the delivery mechanism for a precious, fragile stream of audio, there is an uncompromising, almost militaristic component to radio's mission-that of vigilant protector. Seal the perimeter. Radio tightly focuses on a certain sound source to the rigid exclusion of all others. In a radio engineer's control room, there's a sanctity surrounding audio that you just don't see anywhere else in the media world. That's because with most other communications technologies, particularly anything with moving visuals, the task is not to slow down time, but to feed it as it ravenously marches forward.