How Silence Shapes the Mind
The 60s are always repeating because the 60s were a result of the effect of TV on culture. It was when "#MeToo" actually started.
While I watched the Facebook Livestream of the Emma Gonzales speech at the March For Our Lives rally ("MFOL"), (essentially TV, in a 4-up configuration as if watching surveillance camera footage on a cathode ray tube), I was reminded of watching Tienanmen Square in 1989, the South Central riots in 1992, the Branch Davidian/Waco raid in 1993, and 9/11, all on a tube TV.
In some sense, "The Revolution will not be televised" was playing out as well, but from the other end of the telescope: The purported "Revolution" is in fact tacitly taking place without media, but not by democratic means.
The "March For Our Lives" coverage stood out as one of these moments for me, specifically because of the use of timed silence, as a semiotic representation (and displacement) of a predetermined block of time, and I immediately thought of Cage's 4'33".
Silence calls attention to space, either the present space or a place in memory, and they can be filled with whatever the viewer brings to it. In the case of 4'33", it is the ambient sound in the space. At the 6'20" moment, it was a space set aside to be filled with the memory of the occurrence as a memorial--a kind of "reflecting pool", through the ironic displacement of a live broadcast, whose place (and memory) was recontextualized through a screen. But whatever revolutionary aspects that were there, were not televised.
From a book I'm reading:
"But what about a lack of sound? Silence, especially in a normally noisy context, can be an extraordinarily powerful emotional acoustic event. Since we are always presented with subconsciously monitored background noise, a sudden lack of outside sound leaves an awful lot of attentional and arousal control bandwidth available....The detection of the absence of sound, while slower than the detection of a sound, triggers its own set of responses, increasing attention and arousal, which can lead to internal mechanisms of increasing your ear's gain or sensitivity...or something as complex as the utter silence of UC Davis students as the school president walked by after an incident in which a police officer pepper-sprayed some non-violent protesters on campus-a social warning by denial of sound." Horowitz, Seth S. The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind. Bloomsbury, 2012. (121)
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