Filters Are Not Enough; The Right to Silence as a Design Imperative: Ethan Plaut, BayCHI Program
Channel: BayCHI, San Francisco Bay Area ACM SIGCHI
Date: 2023-01-23

April 12, 2016
https://baychi.org/calendar/20160412
What role should silence play in the design of information technologies? Information and noise, much as engineers might try to separate them, often rise together. The "more is better" dreams of big data and ubiquitous technology undervalue silence as our devices beep, blink, and vibrate ever more frequently, in ever more unlikely places, with ever tinier details coming in and, perhaps more worrisome, being recorded and sent out. Information technologies are lauded as enabling the exercise of our rights to free speech, but how free can speech be against this backdrop of noise that threatens to overwhelm it?

In this talk I propose a heretical interpretation of the First Amendment and retell a history of information technologies centered on silence. Digital democracy and private life alike take silence as a basic building block, so it is critical that we take seriously silence as both human right and guiding principle for engineering and design.