White Noise

Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. In a world of easy access to information, why are people unable to agree on basic facts?

Teaching Suggestion: This question will engage the students with one of the main ideas in the novel—the inability to pin down reality using facts, language, and observations. Time and time again, characters disagree on how to assess the reality they perceive—or think they are perceiving—creating a helplessness that is bewildering and freeing at the same time. In White Noise, reality seems to change depending on the media that characters interact with and the language they use to discuss it. This discussion connects to the theme of The Ubiquity of Mass Media.

• This article from The Conversation explains how people determine what is “true” in a world overwhelmed with facts.
• This 6-minute video from Newsthink explains how quantum physics has proved that observing a particle can indeed change the reality of that particle, causing a profound rethinking of the limits of human understanding.

2. Pretend you are a young American in the year 1985.