Most of us get a daily dose of techno-drugs that are supposed to give us mobility, flexibility and connectivity, and ultimately make life easier for us. But look at their side effects. Noise has mutated from something audible into various forms of sensory stimuli: billboards, spam email, unsolicited text messages, online bulletins, networking websites, etc. We even have noise in our cable TV signal. Ours has become a noisy world, and the noise is becoming louder and more intrusive.
What has spawned this mutation? It’s us. It’s our claim that everyone is free to speak up. Ours is a generation that values self-expression above all else.
Thus, blogs, Friendster, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube have suddenly become the cultural epicenter of the youth. Who cares if the tweaked photos we upload or if the blog entries we write are read by somebody else? We simply smile at being able to post things online and leave everything to luck.
As if our fingers are not that busy already, we also won’t let a day pass without sending dozens of graphics-laden email and a hundred text messages, most of them forwarded several times and carrying an implied request that says, “Reply to confirm you’re alive.”
Now that everyone is speaking up, no one wants to listen anymore. The only time we listen is when our eardrums are pumped with music and podcasts from our portable media players. Is this a paradigm shift in effective communication?
Every corner of our favorite website, glass-walled workplace, perpetually-under-repair roadways and 71-channel-equipped home cinema screams out noise. There is corruption, terrorism, changing global trade rules, worsening poverty and new health threats, but the fundamentals of living are usually left out of our radar screens. The more talkers there are, the more they become tiresome and ineffective. Freedom of expression has given us the freedom to suffer exhaustion.
It’s a little weird, but I learned the value of shutting my mouth up once in a while from a call center agent. I suppose this friend of mine was just tired after talking all night at work. But I realized that he was making a difference and people noticed him more when he was quiet.
I wanted to shut out some noise myself, so I kept quiet, too. I also stopped texting, blogging, surfing the Net, and watching newscasts for a while. It made sense. I enjoyed some peace of mind without missing anything critical or something necessary for survival. It was a very private period sans the preoccupation with technological hype and social pressure.
It’s crazy how we strive so hard to express our individuality in the hope of being recognized and respected—only to end up without an audience. Shouting at a million decibels won’t get us anywhere if nobody cares.
Be silent and the world will notice. And soon it will listen.
Ferdinand A. Ocsit, 25, is an employee of an American outsourcing company preparing real property reports for banks in the United States. When he’s not working, he updates his blog, conceptualizes his dream house, or writes essays.
