flâneur

Impossible Silences - by L. M. Sacasas

theconvivialsociety.substack.com · 2,900 words · saved by 1 readers

In this installment, I reflect on the challenge of speaking online in the absence of meaningful silences. The point is not, in this case, to complain about social media but rather to speak a good word for silence and its place in human communication.

Over the years, I’ve thought on and off about silence in the context of digital media. Mostly, this has taken the form of commending what came to be called strategic silence. The idea being that, given the dynamics of the attention economy, it is sometimes better to pass over certain developments in calculated silence than it is to comment on them or even to speak out against them.1 At other times I’ve commented on how the structure of social media generates an imperative to speak, and how in times of crisis and tragedy this imperative to speak feels especially disordered. More recently,…

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