Public forms of silence do have, of course, some positive associations and uses. In our common law, for instance, the right to silence is an important guarantor of the presumption of innocence. Enshrined as a right, silence offers us protection from coercion and self-recrimination under duress. At the same time a widely observed tradition of a minute (or two) of silence puts silence at the centre of our public expressions of grief. We honour the dead in silence, which acts as a disinfectant of sorts, cleansing the living and our impure, noisy, forgetful, sacrilegious world.

And then, of course, we have the utopian silence. Like ‘‘some old forgotten animal from the beginning of time’’, German writer Max Picard wrote some six decades ago, ‘‘silence towers about all the puny world of noise’’. This is silence as the sublime — Gulliver in the land of Lilliputians (that’s us). In most religious and spiritual traditions silence is the domain of prayer, contemplation, observance and self-denial. And, of course, in our world of relentless noise assault and noise pollution this kind of silence as the place of purity and spirituality — or perhaps by now any kind of silence — seems close to extinction. Inevitably the idea of silence becomes heavily romanticised and cajoled by various ‘‘slowing down, logging off and dropping out’’ social movements. Still I wouldn’t want to over-ironise here

Maria Tumarkin’s essay on the interaction between speech and silence in social dynamics feels really timely now. With blogging superceding magazine writing, the more nuanced speech dynamics seem to be losing visibility to the dogma, charismatic punditry and plain identity politics stoushing that can really boost a bloggers profile.  Poor nuance; so good for getting past conflict to really engage on complex issues, still the overlooked little sister of drama in terms of blog hits.