It seems that all of our apparatuses push us to say, share, do, read, and "silence" is considered a coward take on reality. As Laurence Scott puts it "Nowhere in its history has the word “mute” been related to obscuring or rendering invisible; it has always been associated with the absence or disciplining of sound." In May 2014, Twitter announced its official silencing feature. Note the cross-wired senses: “Muting a user on Twitter means their Tweets and Retweets will no longer be visible in your home timeline.” Voice Chat: This one-time redundancy, which prior to the digital age would have seemed as strange a term as, say, Ear Listening, now offers a valid distinction. “Chat” alone no longer implies vocals. Voice Chat thus efficiently suggests, in two words, how our assumptions about sound, and the ways we perceive it, are not what they used to be. (1) Being a composer, Cage had a powerful interest in what silence was or was not, and he went on to muse about it for the rest of his life, even writing a book titled Silence, in 1961. Since there could be no such thing as the absence of sound for a living, breathing human being with a pulse, what then could silence be? It was a matter of intent, Cage decided: The essential meaning of silence is the giving up of intention. Silence is not acoustic. It is a change of mind. A turning around (2).
