Ethics and Information Technology (2007) 9:281–295 Ó Springer 2008 DOI 10.1007/s10676-007-9148-0 When Nightingales Break the Law: Silence and the Construction of Reality Sandra Braman Department of Communication, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 210 Johnston Hall, 2522 E. Hartford Avenue, Milwaukee, WI 53211, USA E-mail: [email protected] Abstract. Strikingly, theorizing about digital technologies has led us to recognize many habitual subjects of research as figures against fields that are also worthy of study. Communication, for example, becomes visible only against the field of silence. Silence is critically important for the construction of reality – and the social construction of reality has a complement, the also necessary contemplative construction of reality. Silence is so sensitive and fragile that an inability to achieve it, or to get rid of it, or to correct the wrong kind of silence often provides early indicators of individual, group, communal, and society-wide stresses from information tech- nologies. Indeed, we might treat difficulties with silence as miners treated canaries in coal mines, as early warning signals. The story has already been told that nightingales in London now have to sing so loudly in order to be heard above the ambient noise that the birds are in danger of breaking the noise ordinance law. Surely something has gone awry if nightingales break the law when they sing. Finding ways to protect silence as an arena of personal and social choice is a particularly poignant, evocative, and instructive ethical and policy horizon at this frontier moment for the human species. This article introduces the theory of the contemplative construction of reality, explores what the study of silence tells us about reality construction processes, and outlines a research agenda. Key words: communication, contemplation, contemplative construction of reality, law, policy, silence, social construction of reality, solitude figures against fields that must themselves also be the Even though reality subjects of study. In part, this development owes may not exist, honest dues to the contributions of thinkers such as we have a right to it. Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault. In part, how- ever, this trend also reflects qualitative changes in the Introduction types and quantity of data we are gaining about the world, the ways in which we are able to see that data, The ostensible subject for those who study commu- and our capacities to manipulate data in multiple ways nication is noisy and convivial. Like all subjects of using theoretical, conceptual, and methodological study, however, expression is a figure that only tools from across disciplines. Examples of areas in appears against a field, and for communication that which our knowledge is expanding in this way include field is silence. In the digital environment, silence is the indeterminacy against which we must understand increasingly rare – in parks we are surrounded by the determinacy (Martine 1992), the tacit knowledge music and conversation of others, in the classroom or against which we must understand codified knowledge performance hall or church phones burst forth like (Kahin 2004), the nonlinear relations against which roaring motorcycles, and even in the solitude of our linear relations appear (Ragin 2000), and the silence homes we are drenched in information overload. against which communication becomes known. Digitization has also, however, expanded our Studying silence is particularly valuable because it is knowledge into new territory. Theorizing about the so sensitive to stresses caused by information technol- effects and nature of digitization has widened our ogies that the loss of silence serves as an early indicator vision to include both figure and field; long-standing to possible sources of harm for individuals, families, subjects of intellectual study are now being seen as communities, and society as a whole. The literature on 282 SANDRA BRAMAN silence reveals its importance for reality construction literature on silence developed concurrently with the processes, which include both the social construction of efflorescence of mass personal computing (Tannen and reality and what I will call the contemplative construc- Saville-Troike 1985; Jaworski 1992). Today enough tion of reality. Information overload and other negative people have publicly expressed concern about silence effects of the use of digital technologies create ethical that offering quiet rooms has become a hotel selling problems when they impede our ability to construct point; silence-related matters are forefront in every- reality in a valid and sustainable way. one’s minds because the information-intensivity of It is worth saying something about three notions every element of the world in which we live is that will figure prominently: contemplation, contem- increasing. As Weiser and Brown (1995) put it, when plative practice, and the contemplative construction computers were used by only a few experts behind of reality. Contemplation can be defined as the ‘‘act closed doors, the need for calm in the digital world was of beholding, or looking at with attention and relevant only for a few – but now that networked thought’’ (Oxford English Dictionary); it is an act of computers are everywhere, this is an important issue reflecting deeply on something. Contemplative prac- for us all. Both communication and silence should be tices are those activities – developed primarily within taken into account when building, analyzing, making various religious traditions, and including but not policy for, and experiencing what Nardi and O’Day limited to silent meditation – by which individuals (1999) usefully named our information ecologies. invoke and exercise their ability to attend deeply, i.e. Pinchevski demarcates that which is communicable to contemplate. The contemplative construction of from that which is not at the divide between the reality, a notion meant to call to mind and to com- ordinary and the extraordinary, describing this border plement that of the social construction of reality, is as ‘‘the next frontier to be conquered’’ (2005, p. 165). that aspect of reality construction that takes place We face additional frontiers today: through silent contemplative practices by individuals. • There is the biological frontier of the loss of silence, This article begins by looking at silence as it appears in tension with the long auditory history of efforts at what many believe to be a frontier moment for the to bring ourselves into more sound (Sterne 2003). species as it further evolves. It goes on to look at the • There is the cultural frontier marked by the shift social and contemplative processes of reality con- from print to digital communications (Joyce 1995; struction, the role of silence vis-a-vis those processes, Theall 1995), a boundary which, as happened with and what an initial research agenda for techniques by the transition from oral to written communication which silence and the contemplative might be pro- (Leidlmair 2002), draws attention to changes in the tected might look like. This essay therefore explores nature of silence itself. what those who study communication have learned • There is the historical frontier (Niethammer 1992) about the place of silence in the contemplative and generated by the growing predominance of epige- social construction of reality at this critical moment in netic forces (causal influence across space at a what it means to be human. This is a vast undertaking single point in time) over genetic forces (causal – more than one author can hope to complete in an influences across time at a single point in space) initial study – but it is hoped that these remarks will (Braman 1994).1 help open up discussion of a research agenda. • And there is the ontological frontier as we struggle to achieve a sense of reality within a postmodern environment influentially described as hyperreal Silence as field: The digital dilemma (Baudrillard 1983). The suggestion that loss of silence can serve as a None of these frontiers, notably, is marked by a bright stress indicator is borne out in analysis of its role at line. They are, in Crapanzo’s (2004) terms, ‘fuzzy the variety of frontiers humans face as a species. horizons,’ horizons with auras that draw us to them. All of them, however, are approached, rebuffed, Silence and the frontiers of the human engaged, negotiated, redesigned, and/or crossed through the processes of reality construction. It is for Awareness of silence as integral to the communicative field has long been important to those who study 1 Epigenesis affects silence in two ways: Epigenetic information technologies. Indeed, Marshall McLuhan’s globalization processes cause what has been described as a (1964) seminal insights into ways in which technologies massive linguistic extinction unprecedented in human his- alter how we experience being human were initially tory (Heller-Roazen 2005). And we have become acutely inspired by Hans Selye’s (1956) work on the impact of aware of the silences of place as well as those that mark stress, including noise, on the body. The interdisciplinary pauses or lacunae in time. WHEN NIGHTINGALES BREAK THE LAW 283 this reason that we can consider the legal problem of include contemplative practices within their purview. silence, which will be discussed below, the canary in the DeVito (2002) links meaning-making through silence coal mine for many of the ethical and policy issues to other forms of nonverbal communication, and presented by the use of digital technologies. Ishii (2004) finds silence so important to productivity, empowerment, and communicative expressiveness Conceptualizing silence that he believes a Buddhist epistemology would be useful in studying intrapersonal communication. Though it is common to think of silence as an This is a wildly disparate literature driven by very absence, there is a long history of thinking about different types of questions. In part this reflects the silence as a presence, often the product of intention fact that the field of communication itself is, today, a and agency.