Full Description
Silence and Society addresses the reality that social sciences have ignored the importance of silence in human communication. Without communication, there is no community and thus no society. Yet, as classic communication theory explains, communication must always deal with noise. Increasingly, as cyber-technologies and media have gained the upper hand in social life, so have they become purveyors of empty noise—from mindless sitcom television to uninformed talk radio to cable news blather and more.
The book is organized into three sections, each corresponding to a level of social order. Each bears a distinctive relation to the general problem of silence and noise in human community. "Part One: Social Facts of Silence" presents examples of the ways silence intrudes on vital aspects of human life: in personal self-understanding, in the irony that direction communication requires a third absent party (such as Goffman's ego identity), in the fact that personal identity is the challenge of dealing with the trouble of deciding who we are in a given social setting. "Part Two: Noise, Dreams, and Identity Confusions" considers a range of community issues from the strange noises of quiet neighborhoods to the way the necessity of social conformity silences individual autonomy, to the fact that the dead are ever present in daily language and behavior, especially in common religious practices. Finally, "Part Three: Waste, Death, and the Beyond of Time" suggests the principal ways the growing global environment aggravates human inequality—by forcing the poor into zones of exclusion, by increasing the mountain of human waste that in turn wastes human lives, by the extent to which global theories and programs for economic development are little more
Contents
PrefaceAcknowledgments
Part One: Social Facts of Silence
1. Silence and Society: Below the Bottom Turtle
2. The Dead, the Living, and the Yet to Be Born—Never-ending Social Things
3. 1950—Conformity and the Crisis of the Idealized Individual
4. Westward Journeys: Searching for Silence
5. Clamorous Global Development — Democracy, Health, and Suicide in Silent India, with Vani Kulkarni
6. Slouching Toward Inequality—Entropic Inequality and the Death of Societies
Part Two: Noise, Dreams, and Identity Confusions
7. Bad Noise Disturbs the Collective Mind
8. History's Failed Search for Identities—The Silent Self
9. Fuckin' Old Man—Noise and Silence in Analytic Talk
10. The Silent Third: Augustine of Hippo, Charles Sanders Pierce, Erving Goffman
11. Icons and Social Fictions—Object Lessons/Many Kinds
Part Three: Waste, Death, and the Beyond of Time
12. Shit and other Fecal Matters at the Tail End of the Modern Era
13. Zygmunt Bauman on Liquid Waste, Being Human, and Bodily Death, with Makenna Goodman
14. What Would the Dead Have Said—Durkheim's Ghost, A Century Later
15. Father is Gone: The Dead Who Never Stop Talking
16. And That's Not All: Last Words from the Ashes, by Noah Lemert
