The Sound of Silence.....
A short essay on the meaning of silence...this is an early draft and work in progress
The Skin of a Living Thought…
A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Towne v. Eisner, 245 U.S. 425 (1918).
‘He’s not happy, he wants to do the interview again’. In the early years of the millenium I remember taking an apologetic phone call from a local authority contact asking me to return to their site to repeat the video conferencing interview that I’d just done. To be honest, I wasn’t entirely surprised by the phone call; I had a feeling that this might happen at some point. This is a story of words, silences and how they weave together in different ways.
It was the early days of video conferencing - long before Zoom or COVID - when I was engaged in a research project for a North West English town council and video conferencing at the time was confined to very few business settings, most ordinary people had never come across it. But this council had decided to experiment using it in their Trading Standards department and I was brought in to do a research project comparing the experience of a group of users using video against a face-to-face setup. (I suspect what the council really wanted to do was make a case for shutting various face to face facilities and they needed supporting evidence that remote video conferencing worked just as well). I was doing an academic project on technical communication at the time and needed a topic so of course this was a perfect opportunity to test what was then a novel form of communication (which of course became ubiquitous in the decades that followed).
I tried as far as possible in the design of the research to remove any factors which would have privileged either modality; I had worked in information technology for some years and was favourably disposed towards video conferencing believing that it would provide an equivalent experience. But to my surprise, that was not at all what I actually found.
Instead it became immediately obvious to me that the interviews using video conferencing differed significantly from face-to-face communication. For example the man who wanted to repeat his interview was in a foul mood immeditately afterwards even though he had successfully followed the script, we had got on well, and there was no apparent problem. But he was sufficiently upset to contact the council directly afterwards (they were responsible for contact details) to demand that he be allowed to redo the interview (which I duly did, although I did not include the second interview in the results). He couldn’t explain why he was so upset, it could just have been down to his personality, but it was obvious to me at that point in the research that he was not alone - that the other subjects using video also found the process unsettling and much harder work than the face-to-face subjects did. I might have, in other words, recorded one of the first instances of what is now known as ‘Zoom fatigue’.
It wasn’t the verbal content of the interviews themselves that was the problem, as these were identical in both cases and these were ficitious simple complaints. It was just that the subjects completely altered their body language, tone, pacing and posture speaking to the camera and this seemed to put them in a different and worse mood afterwards. In other words:
the technology significantly changed the way people communicated and how they felt about the communication.
My report afterwards waffled on about non verbal cues and the value of shared visual objects like documents - but I couldn’t squash the central findings that people were far less happy talking to a camera than they were talking to a person. The words used in the face-to-face interviews and video interviews were the same - but the context had shifted. People in the video settings were working much harder to convey meaning and without receiving any feedback from another person, they were less satisfied with the interaction. They spoke, but they didn’t feel heard.
I voiced my opinion at the end of the study that the council might pay for any cost savings it made with public dissatisfaction. Not surprisingly I never heard anything back, and the report probably got quietly shelved or binned.
One of the things I did notice in those ill fated interviews was the different ways that silence was intrepreted between them. When someone fell silent in the face-to-face interview it was obvious that they were thinking about how to reply, or that they didn’t wish to answer. Sometimes their silence signalled that they were tired and had had enough - the silences and pauses in the face-to-face interviews also altered the sense of the words around them, acting almost like rests in musical notation, weaving differing meanings and subtly tweaking the atmosphere.
Conversely in the video interviews, it was as if the technology drew a veil over this undercurrent in the conversation. Perhaps this is why several of them found the experience unsettling and why one of them was upset enough to demand to redo the interview. It would be difficult to find a similar cohort of people today as familarity with smart phones and video calling is ubiquitous post COVID. But the people in my study had never used video before (for some it was their first experience of computers) and their reactions to it were revealing, almost as if an uncontacted tribe had suddenly been introduced to television. They understood the language being used - but they did not yet understand the grammar of the medium (which of course brings to mind McLuhlan’s famous dictum that ‘the medium is the message’).
The Sound of Silence….
It takes more time and effort and delicacy to learn the silence of a people than to learn its sounds. Some people have a special gift for this. Perhaps this explains why some missionaries, notwithstanding their efforts, never come to speak properly, to communicate delicately through silences. Although they "speak with the accent of natives" they remain forever thousands of miles away. The learning of the grammar of silence is an art much more difficult to learn than the grammar of sounds." Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich, the famous philosopher and writer - who himself spoke several languages - talked about the difficulty of intrepreting silences in differing languages and cultural settings. Silence in one setting may be a sign of acquiesence, and in another a sign of resistance, it takes time and cultural knowledge to correctly decipher it and many never can. Silence can also be an act of resistance in the face of attempts to exert hegemony or dominance. One place that is acutely aware of this is Northern Ireland where the famous mantra is ‘whatever you say, say nothing’.
Whatever You Say, Say Nothing…
Northern reticence, the tight gag of place
And times: yes, yes. Of the "wee six" I sing
Where to be saved you only must save face
And whatever you say, you say nothing.
This of course is the title of Seamus Heaney’s famous 1975 poem about how people in Northern Ireland negotiated the often complex territories of language, power and identity. What is not asked in conversation there is often as powerful as was is discussed openly - the gaps in conversations providing an undercurrent that few apart from natives can successful negotiate and intrepret.
That strategic silence was a crucial weapon well understood by those interacting with the security services in Northern Ireland, the famous mantra ‘whatever you say, say nothing’ was not just an injunction to individuals to carefully police their language, it was also a reminder of the potential of language to distract and mislead, as a cloak for reality either by active lies or by strategic witholding of information.
You have the Right to Remain Silent….
Of course the security services in Northern Ireland were fully aware of this tactic and in 1988 this prompted the hasty introduction of an order limiting the rights of suspects to rely on the previously long enshrined police caution ‘you have the right to remain silent’. Amnesty International complained at the time that:
The Order limits the right of silence of all criminal suspects in Northern Ireland. Thus the government was able to change in Northern Ireland, in short order and without public debate or parliamentary scrutiny, a well-established principle of jurisprudence which is still the subject of heated debate in England and Wales.
The ‘well established principle of jurisprudence’ they referred to in English Common law ‘the right to remain silent’ dated from the seventeenth century and it was to prevent individuals self incriminating themselves by accident (similar rights exist in the US under the ‘Miranda warning’).
But the 1988 order in Northern Ireland undermined this by the addition of the clause ‘but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something you later rely on in court’ - thus the state weaponized silence against the citizen, and this was then extended to the rest of the United Kingdom. Thus the strategic silences of ‘say nothing’ could now be turned against those who employed it.
Words, words, words…..
Today there is an tsunami of spoken or written words - there can hardly have been a time in human history in my view where language, either spoken or written have achieved such prominence in human consciousness. The adept and fluent use of words is considered by many to be the hallmark of a civilised individual and this creation is through education.
Language in this view is an imaginal commons; the dictionary definition of words providing a set of neutral tools or tokens which can be passed between individuals as a means of negotiating shared realities. Those people who can command the most words, those who possess the most tokens are at the most advantage and can navigate the world best.
What is language for?
This seems like a silly question - the most obvious and common sense answer being that language is to carry meanings between different people; to convey a shared reality between human beings using verbal or written representations.
I have recently watched two interviews. The first was by the Guardian journalist Carole Cadwallar was a moving, passionate, brilliant denunication of the dangers that Silicon Valley and AI were presenting to journalism and to the world in general in a TED talk. It was brave, intelligent, crystal clear…….and futile.
She herself said that she noticed during her talk while most of her audience were supportive, there was a visible section who were openly hostile and she could feel their aggression radiating towards her.
Then I watched the second interview of Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. He was fluent, apparently reasonable and extremely articulate but there was one moment in the interview which stood out for me.
This was when the interviewer put to him that a cartoon produced by AI in the style of Charlie Brown, but done without the creators’ permission, was an act of intellectual theft. Some of the audience at this point started to applaud and Altman’s reaction, ignoring the question entirely - was to wave at them dismissively saying:
Feel free to applaud, enjoy yourselves
What was so revealing about this was what Altman chose not to do.
He didn’t attempt to defend his position, or to negotiate the meaning of the word ‘theft’ with his interviewer - which would have acknowledged it as a morally charged act.
He ignored clear public disapproval in support of the interviewer’s question - choosing instead to ignore it entirely, indicating his disdain in a hand wave both for the interviewer’s question and for the audience.
In other words, Altman apparently saw the invocation of the word ‘theft’ in the interview, not as an invitation for a serious discussion or an opportunity to negotiate the reality being invoked, but instead as part of a power play between him and the interviewer, a verbal wrestling match in which only one party could win.
And the strategy he reached for to exert dominance over his interviewer was strategic silence - to entirely ignore the question - disregarding the word ‘theft’ and thus draining it of legitimacy - if ‘theft’ elicts no reaction, then no one can be accused of it.
Why does this matter?
Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, a large language model commonly known as Artifical Intelligence which run on the tokenization of language treating words as individual data points in an ongoing iterative process.
Tokenization is the process of splitting the input and output texts into smaller units that can be processed by the LLM AI models.
But in my view there is a significant issue with this, in his model - silence or other situational cues are entirely absent, they are wholly depend on words (while this is also true in the earlier shift from oral to written cultures compensatory mechanisms like education process which provide cultural settings like schools or libraries for the intrepretations of text were developed - this is not true yet of interactions with AI).
As with the subjects in my long ago experiment - the use of AI strips language entirely away from its embodied and situational context. The human party to this interaction is at a disadvantage here - they may understand the language used in the responses given by AI, but in my view we do not yet have the tools to understand the emotional toll that it may take on us nor do we fully understand the relationship that we are co creating with. Regardless of what we believe is giving us the answer, what is the process of asking the question eliciting in us? Is our silence on receiving our answer from AI replete with gratitude or dread? And how do we intrepret the silences we might experience interacting with AI? Are they technical glitchs, or is it something more portenous? Is the instant availability of answers an advantage, or a threat to our mental well being.
This points to a more insidious danger that Illich talked about in 1982, long before the development of smartphones, remote video or Artificial Intelligence, a warning that is astonishingly prescient.
The issue which I propose for discussion should therefore be clear: how to counter the encroachment of new, electronic devices and systems upon commons that are more subtle and more intimate to our being than either grassland or roads - commons that are at least as valuable as silence. Silence, according to western and eastern tradition alike, is necessary for the emergence of persons. It is taken from us by machines that ape people. We could easily be made increasingly dependent on machines for speaking and for thinking, as we are already dependent on machines for moving.