John Harris’s piece (A real period of reflection? Chance would be a fine thing, Journal, 23 December) on the dearth of quiet reflection and empathetic conversation, especially in social media, exemplifies a longstanding distinction in zoology between two sorts of communication in many species: loud and quiet.
Loud communication is information-poor and benefits the sender, and so deceit is common. Quiet communication is information-rich, honest, and also benefits the receiver. Quiet communication is seen more when sender and receiver have interests in common, such as parents and children, members of the same family or group, believers in the same values, and so on.
The more atomised a society, the less it will use quiet communication. Social media, each user isolated in front of a screen, moves us inexorably towards loud communications. This is the antithesis of what helped make our species successful – cooperating in groups, developing culture – and of what helps make societies or nations successful.
Dr John Richer
Oxford
• John Harris is right. Resistance to online culture is not about “sounding hopelessly old”, but about shaping a future beyond the stupidification of technocapitalism. And as he implies, creative artists tend to know this. Hence, in this paper, George Saunders has described social media as “a toxin we are gleefully and cluelessly injecting into ourselves, even as we ask, ‘Why are we getting so mean and stupid?’” (25 November 2017), while Dave Eggers noted that “humans in person are kind and giving and generous. But online, you see an inversion of every good quality” (23 June 2018). So, a postscript to Mark Hollis: do listen to his eponymous album of 1998, more beautiful still than Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden – and with 18 seconds of silence at the start.
Jeff Wallace
Cardiff
• I agree with John Harris that we need to find calm space to think, away from the media that compete constantly for our attention. While his chosen retreat is the music of Talk Talk, mine is that of Yes – specifically Tales from Topographic Oceans, which has similar reflective and sustaining qualities as Spirit of Eden.
Martin Pennington
Great Glen,Leicestershire
• If John Harris needs appropriate music to evoke divine calm, he should look outside popular culture: try Morton Feldman, John Cage, Gavin Bryars and Howard Skempton.
Martin Cotton
Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire
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