Stop, Hey What’s That Sound . . .

The varying reactions to the first two posts make me realize that I benefit from being prompted to reconsider my preconceptions and tics. So now perhaps I should think anew about a word that has always had a grating effect on me: feedback.

I can more or less date when I first experienced full-bore audio feedback: either in the spring of 1968 at the Fillmore East in Manhattan's East Village or in the summer of that year at the Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland. Maybe a deliberate auditory slash by the guitarist Jeff Beck or an inadvertent ripping reverb from a member of the band Jethro Tull. A jolt, not a thrill.

The Oxford English Dictionary points to the earliest printed use of the term “feedback” in an issue of Wireless Age published in 1920: “An inductive feed-back in relation to the secondary system generates local oscillations.” Feedback as an electrical process is nothing to argue about. And the idea of biofeedback appeals to me, whether or not it really works.

What sticks in my craw, though, is a usage that the OED dates to 1971, from a publication called Frendz: “We began to get a fairly good feedback from most people who know about it and it looked as though the concerts would be good scenes.” (No indication of what the first “it” refers to.) While there’s a positive tone to “feedback” here, it makes people sound like components in psychological engineering à la B. F. Skinner. A person responds or reacts to an event, a phenomenon, a stimulus. But something mechanical becomes integrated into a feedback loop.

I may have a mistaken idea of the dehumanizing overtone of “feedback.” Even so, there is something pernicious about the way the word is deployed in management-speak. When I hear someone say that an employee or a vendor needs to be given “feedback,” I wince. The import is clear: so-and-so has to be told he’s screwed up—and had better shape up. I don’t quarrel with being candid about a failure to do something correctly. “Feedback,” however, has an impersonal, quasi-scientific ring to it that I find off-key. It’s as if the issuer of the criticism were Hal of 2001: A Space Odyssey, blandly rational and incontrovertible, and the recipient the Keir Dullea character, who can have no reasoned response, at least from Hal's point of view. It may be feedback of a sort, but it’s a short-circuited loop.

The more I think about "feedback" as a human activity, the less I think of it.

When the artist Cy Twombly died this past year, the obituaries said he never much cared what people thought of his work. He did as he pleased--and parlayed that attitude into a successful career.