Assessment of silence and the notion of commons
In her essay, silence and the notion of commons, Ursula Franklin discusses the influence of technology on silence and the values of silence we have lost sight of. She claims that before we had “a technologically mediated society” sound was ephemeral and silence was once taken for granted(375). However, advancements in technology have made it possible to multiply sound and make sound permanent thereby proliferating the amount of sound in the environment. Now silence is now seen as a common good because it has become scarce.
She writes that silence is important because it creates an “enabling environment” for “unprogrammable and unprogrammed things” to happen (376). She says it also helps to maintain our “collective sanity”. There is also a power in collective silence that tends towards the spiritual. “It is an enormously powerful event”, she says. She illustrates that the Quakers (a christian faction) upheld the tradition of collective silence and in their meetings and they experience a kind of parapsychological event in which one person speaks what’s in another's mind. She calls it an “uncanny thing”(376).She also admonishes us to beware of programmed silence, that is, silence that allows a planned event to take place because this silence is enforced and unreal. She believes that programmed sound is manipulative and imposed on us. The music in shoe stores or restaurants as imposed on us and they try to manipulate us to patronize these places.
She enjoins us to be conscious of the effects of technology on the soundscape. She calls us to recognize and fight for our rights to silence. She also suggests we find our way back to silence by building quiet rooms and observing a few minutes of silence before we begin anything.
In his essay "French Toys”, Roland Barthes talks extensively on the effects toys have on children. One can imply from his essay that French Toys program children to accept the world the world the way it is. I think these two essays are analogous; the French toys and the building blocks in Barthes essay are analogous to electronic sound and silence in Franklin's essay respectively. I believe that a balance ought to be struck between the contrasting values. Children can play with French toys to know about their present environment and complement with building blocks to put their imaginations to work. So sound in the environment for communication, entertainment and other purposes should be balanced with silence to maintain our collective sanity.
Franklin did not dwell extensively on the negative effects of the problem in her essay unlike Barthes. What would be the outcome if silence is eliminated from our environment? Do we lose our collective sanity or something worse? Barthes writes that the programming effects of toys limits children's imaginations. The programming effects of technology on the soundscape limits our imaginations and clouds our vision as many of us don't recognize that silence is being depleted in the environment.