Sound Off

We've had portable communication devices now for at least forty years. They started out as a huge battery block with a handset attached, but cellular phones have been around for a while and now, just about everyone has a "smart" device.

With all the miracles of technology that come with those smart devices (many of which we now firmly take for granted) is a myriad of sound notifications and ringtones. At the risk of sounding like a griping oldtimer, when I was a kid, there was only one ringtone. Okay, I just had to say it, but it's true. 

These sounds and notifications were so cool, back when we first got our new smart devices. You could go onto a website and download your favorite snippet of sound from a movie or game and then, whenever anyone texted you or called you, you could regale the entire family with your musical or cinematic tastes.

For Gen Xers, this was a fun way to communicate your preferences to other people of your generation. Micki's ringtone for me was Aragorn's theme from Return of the King and her notification tone was Jarvis, Tony Stark/Iron Man's artificial intelligence butler saying, 'Excuse me, there is a message for you.'

My own shifted (I change things up a lot on my phone, just ask my wallpaper) from Metallica or Iron Maiden to the X-Files theme to the music from The Magnificent Seven (original, not the lousy remake). My message notification was thunder echoing over the hillsides.

Nauseating as this must have been for our digital native children, they stayed fairly quiet about our noisy pocket computers. However, I began to notice something about their devices. Almost as if in reply to their parents' fortissimo tunes and movie quotes, their phones got more and more silent. Nary a ping or burble did I ever hear from their devices.

At first, I chalked this up to them living in a surveillance state. We were tough about monitoring our boys' social media use and although we knew when they were texting or messaging, a silenced device would prevent us knowing how often they were getting messages. But it wasn't just our boys. It was universal. I work with teens as part of my job and most of them also didn't use notification or ringtone sounds on their devices. 

Why not?

Intrigued, I put my phone on the vibrate setting as an experiment. I've never looked back.

Look, I still have no real sense of why the kids decided to do this in the first place. Ever afraid of being like their parents (who are deeply uncool and lame), perhaps, they decided it was too mortifying. Who can plumb the depths of the awkward social strictures of Teen World?

If I were to guess, though, I could venture some of the evidence I gathered from my own experiment. First, I was a bit relieved to find that I didn't have a day full of digital noise—well, even more digital noise—than usual. The moments of silence, not even disturbed by a ringing phone, were somehow an anxiety reducer. Even if my phone is ringing, and the vrrt vrrt vrrt of my vibration setting is not enough to jar me from whatever else I'm doing, they'll call back.

Another reason is, the silence of an event or meeting or funeral or graduation is not interrupted by the theme from Star Wars at the worst possible moment (as if anything could be worse). This alone is enough to forego all sounds of a digital kind. You rest assured knowing that, since your phone is always on vibrate, the goof everybody is shaking their heads at isn't you.

Finally, I think that there is a philosophical problem of having a device that allows you to be in constant connection: you lose sense of the here and the now.

A vibrating phone on the table in the other room isn't usually a life or death problem. It will be occasionally, but that problem is solved by knowing that there are people out there who can connect for you. If they can't reach me, they can call someone nearby. The whole world is saturated with phones. I'd have to get pretty far afield to be unreachable.

Being in connection all the time is great for when you're out in the wilds buried in an avalanche. That tether of digital media is a wonderful thing. But some of the time, silence is the best and most comfortable part of any day.

The joy of silence is one of few afforded us by a world full of sounds that aren't naturally occurring. Sitting by a window listening to a storm or by a fireplace listening to the crackling flames were once rewards for the long days and dark nights of our ancestors. Their lives were by no means quiet, but there likely wasn't so much excess noise.

I'm not judging anyone who keeps their phone turned on, of course. To each their own. Some may need to feel that they can hear messages because they have responsibilities greater than mine. For me, being able to keep one small corner of my life quiet has been a relief and one, it must be said, that keeps me feeling less overwhelmed in a busy, noisy digital world.