Staticfree Blog

(04:42:34) Brigitte: internet needs a peaceful quiet...

The Internet has become a sort of home for me. It's the one place (if you could even call it such) where I find my self returning to each day and falling asleep in. Like a good home, it's comforting to me in many regards - being able to communicate in various ways with my friends and lovers as though they were there. It's missing many things, but one particular one I've been wanting recently - quiet.

The real world is a subtractive environment: you have to actively do less in order to communicate less. You have to make the conscious decision to lay still to not communicate body language. Even then, the pattern and rate of your breathing, the state of your eyes, your facial expression, all say great deals about yourself.

Online, communication is additive. If you want to express yourself, there's a wall up that you squeeze your expression through. You must actively place words, actively create a web page, actively interact with your computer in order to communicate information. The only passive information in the electronic world is your chat status, your avatar. That, though, is ultimately controlled by you, so it is effectively additive.

Why note this distinction between additive and subtractive communication?

Silence.

In an additive world, silence is the norm. If there's nothing happening, then simply nothing is being directly communicated. There's no passive facial expression to show how someone is inside. You can't tell if someone is there and sharing the silence with you, or off playing a video game at top volume. In all the silence, there is no guaranteed lack of activity. You cannot share a silent moment with someone online for there is no silence.

Why is this important? Why does one need to have pure, unadulterated silence? It's a remarkably personal thing. We, as humans, pride ourselves on our accomplishments, on our creations, on our successes. But silence is the opposite of that. There is no activity there. A silence is a moment of reflection: a 4am lay-on-the-couch-and-ponder-the-universe silence. It's a time people can share together, intimate and isolated.

There is no easy way to give the Internet this capability. As noted, it's additive. You would have to literally see all that was happening and hear all that way playing on someone's computer to truly share such an intimate moment like this. Perhaps some things should simply be left to the reality and not recreated in an abstraction.