Digital Silence
or "why experiencing each other through matrix multiplications leads to feelings of isolation"
I have recently fallen madly, rapidly, and completely in love with my girlfriend, Deleree.
Of all the many things I am learning to love about her, the highest ranking reduction would be "her mind". There are of course many other aspects: the snort in her laugh or the knowing look when she is comfortable in a difficult situation, but these aren’t of the mind. These qualities have no hope of being translated into thoughts and compressed into text bubbles.
There has been physical distance between us for ~40% of our relationship. These time-blocks of budding love combined with the immense sense of security and fulfillment I feel with Deleree create an opportunity to study online humanity.
We were recently tapping our thumbs as a part of an ongoing conversation on the nature of our experience in digital reality, when we struck on the topic of digital silence.
The internet is capable of evoking great feelings from it’s inhabitants. Infinitely segmented pixel arrays; sound-byte streams conjure emotion.
But are they produced with emotion? Packaged with it? Transported?
Your first hit of oxycontin will certainly make you feel something. But what did pill press feel? My views on life online changed significantly as I moved from consuming the internet to creating it.
In a digital assembly line feeling is optionally involved somewhere… but it’s not at the end. It’s not in the distribution.
We use spatial metaphors to make sense of the way thoughts disperse online. These are inaccurate. Twitter is not a town square. A town square is three dimensional. Twitter is like a million of those tubes at the bank drive-thru, where you don’t know where they go. Not even the bank knows where they go.
Social media is not a space. At least not in the way that our species intuitively understands a confluence of three dimensions. (Twitter literally uses thousands of dimensions to map and cluster your speech spatially!)
Silence in a warm, shared space is comforting. A partner looking at you is wonderful. Fishing with my best friend a quarter-mile upstream is bonding. This is positive silence.
The feeling when of someone looking into your eyes and listening to you is not possible online. There’s no feedback. Digital silence is not interpreted as listening. This is negative silence.
Silence online means something: they aren’t thinking about me, they’re thinking a lot about me, they don’t like what I said, they’re distracted, they don’t like me, they’re worried, they think I’m stupid, they think they’re stupid, they disagree with what I said, they’re talking to someone else, they’re ignoring me, they’ll never respond, they’re busy, they’re at work, they forgot, they just didn’t see it. How could I possibly know?
We are more willing than ever to bathe in noise, but more cautious than ever to type. Typing is reserved for responses or response generating prompts. To post and hear nothing in return is hell.
It is so fair that so many netizens are scared to speak. Even when we do, there’s a convergent feedback loop to our production on social media. We all see it. Call it social cooling.
I am deathly afraid of digital silence. Screaming into the void is often all I can muster. At least in the void I don’t expect a response. But to create, to think, to share, and hear nothing? That shit sucks. If we are going to talk, we just want someone to listen. Please listen. I can’t hear you listening.
Sufficiently gloomy.
Negative silence is not an axiom of digital interaction. Anyone who’s played Minecraft knows this. Our yearning is appeased by shared experience. Many of my core memories are with treasured friends in online worlds. I spent much of my adolescence there. There I felt comfortable, existing across the x,y,z. (how many axes are in a tweet?)
Why is it so much more comfortable? Well we weren’t thinking! We were existing. People are undeniably good at existing.
By approximating physical space, Discord and Fortnite allowed me to know where I’d find people, live out new stories with them, and re-live them later. This is the real beauty of the internet to me. Not the town square but the school playground. This doesn’t exist over a Zoom meet for work. This does exist over a Dungeons & Dragons Zoom call. One is a space, the other is a meeting.
Humans need space. We exist online. We think online. Social media is not a space. It’s a content supply and demand curve that resembles a blob.
Let’s make some fucking space. Maybe then we can shut up and live together online.
