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+---
+title: 'After the Silence'
+date: '2003-09-12T06:19:31-04:00'
+permalink: /after-the-silence/
+tags:
+    - blogging
+---
+
+I spent yesterday in my office, behind a closed door, listening to music through noise-cancelling headphones. Reading Habermas, on the disintegration of the public sphere. Unable to admit anything else about the day.
+
+It’s hard to get going again, today. There are classes to be taught (one on Habermas, of course), conferences to be held, meetings to attend. But the difficulty in re-emergence has made me start wondering whether the disintegration of the public sphere that Habermas so lamented has less (or less than he thought) to do with the media’s co-opting of public discourse, and its transformation of all of us into passive consumers of same, than with our flight from the media’s excesses into varying modes of silence.
+
+I don’t want to fall into a species of empty net-boosterism, a new blogosphere version of the same old kinds of “the internet is the new agora!” metaphorizing that so populated the early nineties. Nonetheless, there’s a reason that such metaphors — particularly the internet as virtual café — took hold; there’s a power in the sense that we can both retreat from the mainstream media’s noise into a space of silence *and* nonetheless find the signals of like-minded thinkers with whom we can commune.
+
+All this by way of saying, to those of you who did find the words to post yesterday: Thank you. You helped me tremendously.
+