Articles
Stop Shopping, Start Hearing on the National Day of Listening
StoryCorps's National Day of Listening broadcasts dialogues between regular folks as a rejoinder to the loud consumer chaos of Black Friday.
11.23.10
To watch the local news the day after Thanksgiving is to witness a sort of national day of shouting; surely the most disconcerting thing about Black Friday isn’t the desire for discounted sweaters, but the shoppers' odd capacity to ignore everyone else in line. A little listening certainly seems to be in order. And that’s what the National Day of Listening aims to encourage. Begun on Black Friday 2008, it’s an offshoot of the popular StoryCorps series, which records dialogues between regular folks and broadcasts them weekly on NPR. The idea was to designate a shared moment when people could take an hour to cut their own StoryCorps-style conversations. And the date was no accident; the Day is designed as an antidote to 5:00 a.m. shopping sprees. “[It’s] a meaningful alternative to holiday consumerism,” says StoryCorps’s Sacha Evans. “Listening to one another is the least expensive and most meaningful gift we can give.”