(The header photo in the web version is a picture of legendary child star Baby Rose Marie, who in fact did not fear microphones at all, as proven by her incredible 90 years in show business.)
A new phobia arrives
You know how you’re down in a research library sub-basement looking up one thing, and another thing just leaps off the page?
There I was, searching the August 14, 1926 edition of the Saturday Evening Post for what RCA macher David Sarnoff had to say about the future of video — and out pops this bizarre cartoon of sweating musicians. The caption comes from something Sarnoff said about people struck dumb on the air: “There is something terrifying in the utter silence, the total lack of facility for determining what the audience is like.” Though he didn’t use the term, this terror would soon have a name: mike fright.
I’ve felt it. During my first air shift as a student announcer on Iowa Public Radio station WSUI-AM, I felt as if I were talking down a well without an echo. I wasn’t sure anyone could hear me, but it was worse than that. My voice felt distorted and weird as it went into the microphone. If it weren’t for the kindly program director, who actually stood outside the control room booth’s window to give the thumbs up, I might never have come back for another shift.
“It is the very weirdness of the whole business that makes you uneasy at the thought of speaking through a little hole in a cylinder hanging in front of you, to an audience that mounts up into the hundreds of thousands,” Austin Lescarboura wrote in 1922, describing the same disorientation I felt (without the 100Ks of listeners).
Most people in 1922 were already acquainted with microphone-like objects as the receivers on telephones. But radio mics represented a new kind of party line, one with no reply from the other end. That was the weird thing Lescarboura wanted his readers to understand about broadcasting.
“You are not accustomed to addressing a mute and invisible audience. There is a dead silence. No applause of any kind. No comment. Perhaps something went wrong. It is hardly believable that the speech got beyond the four walls of the room.”
Radio’s mike fright is a subset of stage fright, which itself is a subset of glossophobia, fear of public speaking. All of these fears might exhibit themselves as stammering, an inability to vocalize, and physical “flight, fight or freeze” symptoms — including sweating, nausea, and elevated heart rates. When psychologists write about glossophobia, they focus on our fears of being judged. But with mike fright, you have to imagine your judges first, then freak out about the judgment. This is what gives it such an intense, surreal feeling — a feeling with nothing to focus itself on except the microphone itself.1