PART ONE

How Silence Got Lost

Have you stopped to think about just how much noisier the world has gotten in only these past two decades? Few families were using the internet back in the 1990s and, if they were, the startup of their internet modem was still as noisy as the first seconds of that Contact intro. The Sony Discman still reigned in the pre-iPod era; no one yet had “a thousand songs in their pocket,” and there were no smartphones. Not a single one. No one had a Netflix subscription, Audible, or Spotify for that matter—because they didn’t exist yet. No one listened to podcasts on their commute, because podcasts hadn’t been invented yet either. No one talked to their smart speaker; that idea still lived in the domain of science fiction. And precious few spent their after-work hours in a coffee shop, the kind of “third place” that Starbucks so famously created in the decade after Contact, a coffee shop festooned with a curated playlist. Amazon sold only books in 1997, and the only social media that existed was Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. True story. [1]

Now, our experience of life is radically noisier: On average, an American adult will experience between 3,000 and 5,000 commercial messages every day. Every day. [2]

If that doesn’t startle you (and I hope it does), consider the reality that this statistic means that we are confronted with five times more information every day than our grandparents were fifty years ago. Imagine multiplying almost anything in your daily life by five times (traffic, for instance; the average height of buildings; or the line length at your favorite coffee shop) and you’ll start to get the picture.

More information means more access and more awareness, but it also means more distraction and more noise, and distraction and noise are barriers to our ability to experience silence well. Let’s consider noise first.

The increasing volume of noise

From the standpoint of physics, there’s no measurable difference between sound and noise. Both are acoustic vibrations that can be heard or detected. The major, non-physics difference is that noise is sound that happens to be undesirable. Along these lines, most definitions agree that noise is “unwanted sound, judged to be unpleasant, loud, or disruptive to hearing.”[3] Given that definition, is there more noise (unwanted sound) today than ever before? Absolutely yes.

Imagine traveling in a split second from a busy urban environment to the open countryside, with your ears wide open. You would notice a stark audible difference, as the thrum and buzz of the city is replaced by the sudden silence of the countryside. It won’t be an absolute silence, though: you might hear literal crickets.

Since more than 55% of the world’s population now lives in cities (and since that percentage is only climbing), this analogy cuts close to home.[4] For many of us, silence is often reached now by this literal kind of traveling, taking us miles and hours away from the usually “unwanted sounds” of automobile and mass transit traffic, away from the measurable hum of factories and businesses that run their machines 24 hours a day, away from the audible buzz of lights, away from the background noise of our homes we don’t even think we hear until the power goes off, away from the billions of little sounds created by people simply going about their lives. It is then and often only then that we experience what we would consider to be silence. If you add more people to the world, as we do every year, you will get more noise, just like you will get more breathing. Sound happens, but noise happens too, and we don’t even have to go out of our way to create it. 

Ahh, but that’s not quite true: we have gone out of our way to create it. Noise hasn’t escalated within our lifetime simply because there are more of us now. As a global culture, we have actively worked over the last decades to create and then consume far more sound than ever before. We need look no further than advertising, social media, and news.

During the last two decades, the categories of advertising and individual activity have become blurred and amplified through the growth of social media. If you listen to radio, you hear commercials on a regular basis—but that’s been the case for decades. The same has been true of television. But now there’s YouTube, a hugely popular medium where the content itself is often a sound-based advertisement, and sometimes as a result it can be difficult to tell the advertisement before your video apart from the video you meant to see. During the early 2010s, Vines also popularized short-form videos for millennials, and now TikTok has taken up the mantle for Generation Z. Key social platforms that have emerged in the early 2000s and were historically been more visual, like Facebook and Instagram, now feature videos as a healthy percentage of their content and advertising; so, if you’re using those platforms these days, your experience includes sound too. This year, videos are anticipated to make up 80% of consumer internet traffic. And that’s 80% of the traffic created by 4.4 billion internet users.[5] That’s a lot of sound for a lot of people.

The 24-hour news cycle is another sound escalation of the last two decades, something most people hear as well as see. If you’re convinced 24-hour news is being foisted on today’s audiences, keep in mind that it exists only because of our insatiable appetite for it. We’ll watch it, so an increasing number of networks pump it out.[6]

To be sure, there is a great deal to be learned from news, from the most accessible library of human knowledge yet constructed, and even from the posts of family, friends, and acquaintances. For most of us, though, the hours we spend creating or consuming ads, social videos, and news are not our finest moments. They’re not going to be something we’re praised for at the end of our lives (as “eulogy virtues,” what David Brooks would call them).[7] Instead, our technology sessions end up being too much time with sound and too little with silence. You can’t make music with those conditions; just noise.

But . . .  is all this sound unwanted? Is it as a result actually noise? The truth is, we both want and don’t want all these commercial messages, this never-ending stream of audible content. After all, even if commercial messages interrupt the day of an average human at a rate of around three per minute, every single one of them was also written and published by another human. If we’re upset by this level of noise, we need to remember the words of Pogo: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”[8] We humans are the ones creating this noise that bothers us humans. Maybe it’s not you individually, but it’s our society, our culture.

I believe we need to nuance the definition of noise a bit. It’s not simply unwanted sound. For most of us, noise is sound we choose in the moment, but afterwards regret. If the television is on in your house for hours, you’re the one who turned it on, no matter how surprised you might feel when you notice the sun has already set when you turn it off. If you disappear into YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram for hours, it was you who went there, no matter how productive you scramble to get after resurfacing. You can even experience noise while surfing the seemingly benevolent tidal wave of audio books, podcasts, streaming music, radio, speaking to your phone assistant, and smart speakers. In small quantities, consuming any kind of content feels good, even educational. But beyond a line we often cross, it becomes too much. In a recent poll, 50% of teens admitted to having a technology addiction, and so did 27% of adults. Keep in mind that these are the people who admitted to an addiction, the kind of habit most people choose not to confess.[9]

There are many other causes of noise than these digital sources, and these too are far more present than in previous generations. Consider the sounds of automobiles, which reached 1 billion on the road in the year 2010 (that number is expected to hit 2 billion in the year 2035). Or the sounds of airplanes overhead, since there are now more than 100,000 flights each day across the world, double the number from the year 2000.[10]

Noise is ever-present, but it’s only one dimension of our twenty-first century, uber-technologied experience that keeps us from silence. The other dimension is the distraction itself.

Distracted from distraction by distraction

If you own a smartphone (and more than 3 billion of us do), you will spend, on average, three and a half hours today interacting with it. If you’re like 61% of us, you started within 5 minutes of waking up. Today, you’ll make around 2,617 specific interactions on it. And that’s if you’re an average user. For extreme phone users (those in the top 10% of heavy usage), that number is more than 5,400 interactions. All that time adds up. Researchers believe that teens now spend an average of 9 hours a day in front of screens (smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktops, televisions, and so on). For adults, it’s more than 11 hours a day. 11 hours. If you do the math, this leaves only 13 hours for sleeping, eating, work, and anything else in the rest of your life you might need to focus on.[11]

Distraction is its own kind of noise: it’s not always audible, but it has the same effect as audible noise. When we’re unable to concentrate, unable to focus, unable to listen, unable to relax, it doesn’t usually matter whether it’s because of audible noise or because of distractions. It’s especially challenging anymore even to draw a line between distraction that has literal noise and distraction that doesn’t. For instance, many of your phone’s supposedly non-audible aspects have haptic feedback like vibrations that not only feel like something subtle; they sound like something too. Which is why 90% of college students report feeling “phantom ring syndrome,” the experience of thinking their phone has vibrated to signal a call or notification—when it hasn’t.[12]

We are complicit in many of our lives’ distractions, because information—often, literal noise—isn’t simply heading our way in today’s world. We’re also the ones choosing and sometimes even co-creating that noise. Through social media, blogging, podcasts, and comment sections, we can all become publishers, and if there’s a motto for our daily contributions to the updated version of Contact’s noisy earth, it’s bound to be: “Post first. Ask questions later.”

The poet T. S. Eliot described this condition of modern human life in his poem Burnt Norton, even more relevant today than it was in 1936: “Distracted from distraction by distraction.”[13]

As we release our individual bits of information into the atmosphere, the resulting flotilla of data is gargantuan. Data scientists estimate that 2.5 quintillion bytes of information will be created daily in 2020, and that number is only increasing. For reference, a quintillion bytes is a thousand, thousand, thousand, thousand megabytes. It’s a number too big to comprehend. Even more shockingly, 90% of the world’s information has been created in only the last two years. 90%! And this trend seems likely to continue.[14]

We fling out content and posts and videos and interactions as if we’re getting rid of them, launching mini-satellites into the orbit of our influence. But they return to us like so many boomerangs. The noise of likes and responses dings into our mobile devices. Message previews bloop in the top right corner of our laptops. They distract us from our work, from our families and friends, even from the ability to listen to our own life. We end up in a vicious cycle that’s of our own making, but also our own detriment.

A modern plague

Noise pollution is the name for noise that has a harmful impact on human or animal life. Like any other kind of pollution, it’s labeled with that name not because tree-huggers love silence, but because its effects are disastrous and irreversible. Pollution is pollution, no matter what form it takes. Let’s consider some extreme examples, to understand what pollution does to those immersed in it.

Visualize London in the years from the Industrial Revolution through the early 20th century. What does it look like? Even if you live in that part of the world, you may be picturing a regal, historical city, the home of political and literary greats. Here’s what I invite you to picture instead: air pollution. Smog was so thick that, for entire generations, many described the city as brown. Shockingly, the air pollution persisted until at least 1952, the year that “The Great London Smog” killed 4,000 people in the space of a single week. That may not even be the record; it’s simply a number that’s been kept and documented because the deaths that year were the final straw, enough to push for new constraints and legislation.[15]

Water pollution is just as serious in a world increasingly tearing down forests and erecting manufacturing plants along rivers and lakes. There’s a reason that Erin Brockovich had to run a fierce investigative campaign against Pacific Electric and Gas in 1993, and that Rob Bilott had to wage an even more intense legal war against DuPont later in the same decade. There’s a reason so many mothers feared for their children’s health during the Flint Water Crisis discovered in 2014. The reasons have names like cancer, Legionnaires disease, lead poisoning, birth defects, gastroenteritis, parasites, emphysema, premature death. No one wants to drink those when they swallow water.[16]

Let’s take one more pollution extreme, one seemingly harmless by comparison. Imagine being able to see thousands of stars at night—without the need for a telescope or observatory. That was not only possible but a universal experience before the prevalence of mega-cities created enough light pollution to trim the number down to an average of only 250 visible stars. In many places on earth, the number is a mere handful. Light pollution may feel primarily like an aesthetic loss, but it also disrupts plant and animal life, as well as the natural human ability to produce enough melatonin for good sleep.[17]

Noise pollution is just as much a reality, and I’m not just talking about your neighbor who plays his stereo too loud. I also don’t mean mainly cars with mufflers loud enough to turn heads all along the street, the modern equivalent of public obscenity. As we’ve seen with our own 11-hour-a-day technology habits, and the thousands of messages that plaster our daily experience, noise is far more present in our lives than just audible fuzz.  Instead of music, our lives sound much more like Contact’s intro sequence: far too many sounds, far too little silence. If we’re buried in our screens 11 hours a day, that doesn’t even leave enough time for a life we’d describe as music. A friend of ours teaches middle-school students, and they often show up exhausted. When she asked why, they informed her, puzzled that she didn’t already know, that teens typically stay up until 1:00am, and sometimes 3:00am, playing Fortnite and other video games.

Caroline Stephen, a nineteenth-century Quaker theologian, once wrote: “The silence we value is not the mere outward silence of the lips. It is a deep quietness, of heart and mind, a laying aside of all preoccupation with passing things, yes, even with the working of our own minds.”[18] Even though she could have never anticipated the various kinds of noise that are normal in the twenty-first century, her words feel timely. If we are going to travel into silence, we will have to first swim against the current of both noise and distraction, which sometimes come linked together as a package deal.

In 2011, the World Health Organization called noise pollution “a modern plague” and stated that “there is overwhelming evidence that exposure to environmental noise has adverse effects on the health of a population.”[19]

What kinds of adverse effects? Well, it’s not typically death, like the Great London Smog. It’s not typically cancer or other life-threatening diseases, like the Flint Water Crisis. But it’s also not “merely” aesthetic or disruptive, like the practical invisibility of constellations. The effects of noise pollution—and the distraction that typically accompanies it—are far more sinister. They include higher rates of depression, ADHD, loneliness, stress, hypertension, tinnitus, sleep disorders, and even cardiovascular disease and cognitive impairment. While those aren’t death, they’re a ghastly substitute for life.[20]

Since it’s not killing us quickly, there hasn’t been as much of an outrage about noise. There probably won’t be a docudrama starring an A-lister about a noise pollution cover-up. But if noise pollution isn’t killing us, it’s certainly keeping us from a full life.

When it comes to these new channels of noise, our culture isn’t learning well how to use them—and set them aside—in wise patterns. As a result, the tail is wagging the dog, and our tools and information are often using us instead of us using them. I remember several years ago seeing a family portrait a young girl had drawn in crayon. Her dad was looking intently at his smartphone. The drawing wasn’t a joke; it was simply how she experienced him: present with his phone, but not with her.

A call for public repentance

This may feel like a hopeless predicament, but noise and distraction aren’t getting the final word. Over the last several years, there’s been a curious response to their ever-presence. It’s come in the form of public repentance, from the very designers who are responsible for the features that make digital media so addictive, so ubiquitous, so distracting, so noisy. As they publicly repent, these designers have also typically announced that they too are trying to wean themselves off their own technological addictions. Sometimes they’ve taken measures that seem drastic.

For instance, The Guardian reported in late 2017 that Justin Rosenstein had

tweaked his laptop’s operating system to block Reddit, banned himself from Snapchat, which he compares to heroin, and imposed limits on his use of Facebook. But even that wasn’t enough. In August, the 34-year-old tech executive took a more radical step to restrict his use of social media and other addictive technologies.

Rosenstein purchased a new iPhone and instructed his assistant to set up a parental-control feature to prevent him from downloading any apps.

He was particularly aware of the allure of Facebook “likes”, which he describes as “bright dings of pseudo-pleasure” that can be as hollow as they are seductive. And Rosenstein should know: he was the Facebook engineer who created the “like” button in the first place.

A decade after he stayed up all night coding a prototype of what was then called an “awesome” button, Rosenstein belongs to a small but growing band of Silicon Valley heretics who complain about the rise of the so-called “attention economy”: an internet shaped around the demands of an advertising economy.[21]    

Justin’s not the only one. Leah Perlman, who was on the same team that created the “awesome” button, has installed a web browser plugin that eradicates her Facebook news feed, and she’s hired a social media manager to monitor her Facebook page so she doesn’t have to. She confesses, “One reason I think it is particularly important for us to talk about [technology addiction] now is that we may be the last generation who can remember life before.”

Loren Brichter created the pull-to-refresh feature that keeps us swiping for real-time content. “I’ve spent many hours and weeks and months and years thinking,” he confesses,

“about whether anything I’ve done has made a net positive impact on society or humanity at all. Smartphones are useful tools. But they’re addictive. Pull-to-refresh is addictive. Twitter is addictive. These are not good things. When I was working on them, it was not something I was mature enough to think about. I’m not saying I’m mature now, but I’m a little bit more mature, and I regret the downsides.”

Tony Fadell, one of the creators of the iPod and iPhone, has even called for a new Hippocratic Oath among tech designers: first, do no harm.

These kinds of radical moves from insiders should disturb us all. They’re the equivalent of DuPont executives who refuse to drink tap water from their chemical plant’s watershed. Or London factory owners who won’t leave their homes without wearing a gas mask. That kind of exceptional behavior would make you stop and think, wouldn’t it?

They might even lead you to change your own actions. They should, since they’ve already changed those who know the costs most keenly. When Bill and Melinda Gates’ children lived at home, they weren’t allowed to own smartphones. They could use a computer only in the kitchen. Bill famously dedicates his time now to reading massive quantities of books—printed books, that is, not digital ones. Steve Jobs famously limited the use of technology in his home as well, and Mark Zuckerberg claimed he would rather see his daughter reading Dr. Seuss than using Messenger Kids his company sought to popularize.[22]

Jaron Lanier, a founding father of virtual reality, became famous again in 2018 for publishing a book entitled Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.[23] As tech inventors have seen, more distraction and noise isn’t a neutral experience. It’s dangerous.

The bad news before the good

In a decade much earlier than ours, a songwriter who couldn’t sleep scrawled out a song at 3:00 in the morning and recorded it soon after. It was only a few months after JFK had been assassinated. The song, he later explained, is about “the inability of people to communicate with each other, especially emotionally, so what you see around you are people unable to love each other.” The song is Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence.”[24]

In the world of the song, the singer is alone—even when he is surrounded by people and the bustle of the city. No one else is there to communicate with, so he turns to the darkness itself for conversation. Is he awake? Is he only dreaming? It’s hard to tell. Instead of sound and meaning, life seems overcome by distracting neon, artificial light . . . and silence, a troubling silence. Though the neon itself proclaims that “the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls,” no one seems to be listening. People are surrounded by noise but lost in an unhealthy silence they are choosing.

The song was released decades ago, but part of the reason we still resonate with it is that, often, our own era still fails to understand, welcome, and embrace silence. Often, it is because we feel overcome by the noise and distraction that we realize, at times, we have helped to create. A noisy life makes silence feel like a hilarious fib, like fake news.

Coming to grips with our own addiction to noise is an insight that doesn’t feel like good news. But if we’re going to discover how to use silence, we must first come to terms with the misuses of silence too. It’s like hearing the bad news before the good. Hopefully it can help us to hear just how good that good news actually is. It can also help us to glimpse what it might look like to climb out of the misuses of silence for ourselves.

If we’re going to reach healthy silence, though, we’ll need to overcome the ways we’ve been burned by unhealthy silence first.

[1] On the technology prevalent in 1997, see https://www.cnet.com/pictures/this-was-the-hottest-tech-20-years-ago-in-1997/. Steve Jobs’ famous description of the iPod as being “a thousand songs in your pocket” can be found here: https://thisdayintechhistory.com/10/23/1000-songs-in-your-pocket/. A discussion of the concept of “third place” and Starbucks’ pursuit of it can be found here: https://www.fastcompany.com/887990/starbucks-third-place-and-creating-ultimate-customer-experience.

[2] On the number of commercial messages seen every day, see: https://stopad.io/blog/ads-seen-daily.

[3] On the difference between sound and noise, and definitions of noise, see sources cited here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise.

[4] On the percentage of the global population that lives in cities, see https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/2018-revision-of-world-urbanization-prospects.html.

[5] On the increasing percentage of video on Facebook and Instagram, see https://www.wyzowl.com/video-social-media-2019/. On the percentage of videos within consumer internet traffic, see https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/service-provider/visual-networking-index-vni/white-paper-c11-741490.html, and on the global digital population, see https://www.statista.com/statistics/617136/digital-population-worldwide/.

[6] For a brief history of the 24-hour news cycle and its demand, see https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4671485.

[7] David Brooks discusses the difference between “eulogy virtues” and “résumé virtues” in his book The Road to Character. New York: Random House, 2015.

[8] On the origin and use of the phrase “We have met the enemy, and he is us,” see https://humorinamerica.wordpress.com/2014/05/19/the-morphology-of-a-humorous-phrase/.

[9] On the prevalence of technology addiction, see https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/tech-addiction-is-real-we-psychologists-need-to-take-it-seriously/2019/03/18/5f12ad2e-3c54-11e9-a06c-3ec8ed509d15_story.html.

[10] Statistics about the number of automobiles on the road and flights per day can be found here: http://www.oica.net/category/production-statistics/2000-statistics/ and https://www.statista.com/statistics/564769/airline-industry-number-of-flights/.

[11] On the statistics of mobile phone daily use and interaction, see https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2019/02/05/smartphone-ownership-is-growing-rapidly-around-the-world-but-not-always-equally/, https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/us/Documents/technology-media-telecommunications/us-global-mobile-consumer-survey-second-edition.pdf, https://www.inc.com/john-brandon/you-touch-this-gadget-2617-times-per-day-heres-how-to-stop.html, and https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicolefisher/2019/01/24/how-much-time-americans-spend-in-front-of-screens-will-terrify-you/#16823a601c67.

[12] The increase in “phantom ring syndrome” is documented here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6149296/ and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28558902.

[13] T. S. Eliot’s poem Burnt Norton can be found here: http://www.davidgorman.com/4quartets/1-norton.htm.

[14] The total amount of information being created, and the pace of its creation, can be found here: https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/how-much-data-is-generated-every-minute-infographic-1/525692/ and here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2018/05/21/how-much-data-do-we-create-every-day-the-mind-blowing-stats-everyone-should-read/#4ca3fe5560ba.

[15] For the history of London fog and the Great London Smog of 1952, see https://www.history.com/news/the-killer-fog-that-blanketed-london-60-years-ago and https://theculturetrip.com/europe/united-kingdom/england/london/articles/a-brief-history-of-london-fog/.

[16] For more on the Hinkley groundwater contamination and Erin Brockovich’s role in exposing it, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_groundwater_contamination. For more on the Dupont scandal uncovered by Rob Bilott, see https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/magazine/the-lawyer-who-became-duponts-worst-nightmare.html. For an overview of the Flint Water Crisis, see https://www.nrdc.org/stories/flint-water-crisis-everything-you-need-know.

[17] On the effects and statistics around light pollution, see https://www.globeatnight.org/light-pollution.php.

[18] Caroline Stephen’s thoughts on silence can be found here: https://books.google.com/books?id=ZINSDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT254&lpg=PT254.

[19] The World Health Organization’s designation of noise pollution as “a modern plague” can be found here: https://www.nonoise.org/library/smj/smj.htm.

[20] On the adverse effects of noise pollution, see https://docs.wind-watch.org/Goines-Hagler-2007-Noise_pollution__a_modern_plague.pdf, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21707130, https://www.brainfacts.org/thinking-sensing-and-behaving/diet-and-lifestyle/2018/noise-pollution-isnt-just-annoying-its-bad-for-your-health-062718, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0305735607076444, https://www.fastcompany.com/3051835/how-background-noise-affects-the-way-you-work, https://www.environmentalpollutioncenters.org/noise-pollution/, and https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/noise-pollution/.

[21] Interviews with and quotations from Justin Rosenstein, Leah Perlman, Loren Brichter, and Tony Fadell all come from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/05/smartphone-addiction-silicon-valley-dystopia.

[22] On the home-life technology habits of Steve Jobs, Bill and Melinda Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg, see https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/tech-billionaire-parents-limit/ and https://www.businessinsider.com/silicon-valley-parents-raising-their-kids-tech-free-red-flag-2018-2.

[23] Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. New York: Henry Holt, 2018.

[24] On the origin and meaning of “The Sound of Silence” by Paul Simon, see https://wordsmusicandstories.wordpress.com/2017/03/01/simon-garfunkel-the-sound-of-silence/.

Selah

Take a few minutes to consider the following questions. If you journal, these sections will give you perfect moments for that. If you’ve never journaled before, this is a wonderful time to start.

Where, specifically, am I embracing or encouraging too much noise in my life?

What specific habits are distracting me from my real life?

What could I give up that’s currently cluttering my life with noise and distraction?