Impossible Silences - The Convivial Society

Illich’s anecdote is, of course, a provocative reversal of the usual way that new media tend to be presented as a necessarily democratizing and empowering force, and it seems closer to mark as the events of the last decade or so have illustrated. The ostensible promise of social media was that anyone’s voice could now be heard. Whether anyone would

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A second kind of silence is the silence that precedes words, a silence that is a preparation for speech. It involves a patience that deeply considers what ought to be said and how, one that troubles itself over the meaning of the words to be used and proceeds with great care. 

Illich is encouraging a silence grounded in humility, a silence that arises not from a desire to be heard but from a desire to hear and to understand. 

Illich goes on to identify three different kinds of silences as well as their destructive and degrading counterfeits. I won’t walk us through each of these, but I will draw your attention to a few portions of Illich’s discussion. The primary context for what Illich has to say here is the face-to-face encounter, and we would do well, in my view, to ... See more

In the aftermath of the tragic, when silence or “being with” or an embrace may be the only appropriate responses, then only embodied presence will do. Its consolations are irreplaceable. 

Maybe it is possible to bring the spirit of such silences to bear on exchanges that unfold on social media, but it seems that we are then working against the grain of the medium, seeking a fullness of experience in the absence of the materiality that sustains it. But perhaps that is all that we can do. To remember, in its absence, the silence that ... See more

There seem to be two distinct concerns for Illich. The first is that we lose the commons of which silence is an integral part and thus a measure of freedom and agency. The second, concurrent with the first, is that you and I may find it increasingly hard to be heard even as we are given more and more tools with which to speak. Alternatively, we mig... See more

The idea of silence as a commons, as Illich described it here, suggests to a me shared space into which you and I might enter and have just as much of a chance of being heard as anyone else. Technologies that augment the human voice empower those who possess them at the expense of those who do not, setting off the escalatory dynamics that eventuall... See more

“On the same boat on which I arrived in 1926,” Illich explained,the first loudspeaker was landed on the island. Few people there had ever heard of such a thing. Up to that day, all men and women had spoken with more or less equally powerful voices. Henceforth this would change. Henceforth the access to the microphone would determine whose voice sha... See more