People who live in the contemporary age, especially in the United States and other Western nations, are continually bombarded with requests to say something. Whenever we watch a video online, we are told to engage with the algorithm by liking and making comments to videos. When we go out to eat or make a purchase, we are often sent offers at filling out surveys where the companies we buy from want to hear what we have to say about our experience. Professional sites like Linked In and social networks like X (formerly Twitter) and Meta (formerly Facebook) thrive off of the interaction that comes when people make a statement that others respond to with likes, re-posts, and comments. Over and over again we are told to say something, to let our voice be heard, to engage, to communicate.

We might ask why this is so. When we communicate, when we make a statement, we are giving others information about us, and what we think and feel and believe and where we stand. This information can be useful in several ways. We can be put in boxes and receive information and commentary that suits our expressed preferences, and our discussions can let others know how to categorize us and whether or not we are people that they want to communicate about certain subjects with. Our speaking out lets others know whether we are to be considered as friend or foe, and that is certainly useful in days like our own where political and cultural fragmentation and opposition are so great.

Yet there is a great deal of power in not speaking out. If the power of speaking out, of making one’s position known, is the clarion call of a trumpet blast, the power of not speaking out, the power of silence, is in its studied ambiguity. Why would someone not want to communicate, not want to speak out? There are several reasons. Perhaps there is silent agreement, but a desire to avoid receiving attention? Perhaps there is silent disagreement, but a firm belief that speaking would be useless or even harmful in a given situation. One does not know, the silence does not give out enough information to know that one option is true rather than another. The longer the recourse to silence, the less that can be known about how someone feels and why they remain silent, because there is little context that can be used to fill in the silence, except what we imagine to be the case (and what is very likely to be wrong).

I someone silent online? Perhaps they are busy, perhaps they have not gotten your message yet for some reason. Perhaps they are sleeping. We may guess if we know their patterns of behavior, but we do not know, and the less information we have about them, less accurate our guesses about them are likely to be. That makes silence more powerful, because others can guess less about us, can know less about us, can place us less successfully in a context and know what our silence happens to mean. If we want freedom from being put in a box and force people to attend not only to the ease of understanding what we have to say, then we can do nothing more powerful in a world where we know everyone’s perspective and hear about everyone’s rants and raving comments, it seems, then to not give them that information and to make them guess as to the reason and content of our silence.