When did silence stop being golden?

A quiet reminder that the most intriguing parts of life lurk in the knells and cadences of silence.

There is a special place in the hearts of independent film-lovers for a character called ‘Silent Bob’ whose role in Kevin Smith’s 1994 dark comedy Clerks is to be seen but not heard, mostly. His few utterances border on the profound.

While we admire the quiet determination of a strong silent type in film, the live version sitting on the end of a Zoom call is harder to handle. ‘He doesn’t say much, does he!’

Silence – at least what it represents and who wields it – appears out of step with modern archetypes.

(Image - Wix Media - Static noise)

“In a world full of words and social media and attention-seeking YouTube stars, the occasional near-mute hero goes a long way,” notes Ali Plumb, a film critic for Empire Magazine.

To fully appreciate this, society must overcome notions that silence is awkward. “Everyone has experienced the ways in which silence can come across as exclusive, uncomfortable and at times even scary,” asserts polar explorer Erling Kagge in his book Silence in the Age of Noise.

For professional communicators – those who write, broadcast, podcast, advertise and promote for a living – careful argumentation and the strategic and timely use of silence are valuable but increasingly misunderstood tools.

Social media experts like to tell us that posting at different times of the day and in varying frequency are critical to reaching wider audiences. It is all in the way algorithms deliver news to followers; who sees it when and for how long. For example, an average tweet has a 20-minute shelf-life, so early engagement boosts its chance of survival as competing tweets flood in.

A study by Blog2Special of 60,00 bloggers and businesses reveals optimal posting frequencies range from once or twice a day for Reddit and Instagram, two or three times for Facebook and Twitter, respectively, and up to five times a day for Pinterest. That’s a lot of communicating!

Anti-social media?

But when does social media become, well, a bit anti-social? Bombarding people with messages and missives when they are going through seriously tough times lacks commercial sensitivity. Underestimating the utility of strategic silence in times of crisis or brand stress runs a big risk.

As Sprout Social, a brand solutions company, points out: “The transition to everything digital [under Covid-19] has elevated everything about the work you do, and every move you make on social is being scrutinised.”

Like dead air was once to radio, ‘ghosting’ is now considered the gravest of ‘social’ infractions in modern media. And yet, it is in that silence between the posts, mails, and all manner of digital chatter that we pick up the subtleties of the noisy world around us. The unspoken. The journey and the destination.

Ludwig Wittgenstein famously wrote in Tractatus Logico-Philosophico, “whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent”, adding later that “musical thought, the score, the waves of sound, all stand to one another in that pictorial internal relation… between language and the world”.

Thought, logic, language, perception and intention feature prominently in the Austro-British philosopher’s early work. He teaches us that the intention behind silence, and how it is perceived, is where the really captivating stuff resides.

But the big question remains: can a new golden age of silence emerge out of the post-Covid chatter-sphere?

That’s something for Silent Bob to mull over.