ABSTRACT
Silence – in the digital realm – is an odd but welcoming postulation. What does silence look like online? Where does it come from? Why does it, or should it, matter? These are all exceedingly difficult questions to answer, perhaps because ‘digital silence’ is something of an oxymoron. The ‘digital’ is an expression of networked computer technologies constantly transmitting 1s and 0s, a realm of endless data transfer that never sleeps. To invoke silence in such a formulation implies that data flows stop, and that is precisely the point. Oft characterized as a ‘noisy’ infrastructure, the notion of silence is indeed an intervention into the Internet itself – a necessary one that promotes user-first privacy within the virtually boundless reach of Big Data. Of central interest is ProtectMyPrivacy (PMP), a smartphone application that freezes data flows inside of smartphones so as to put the user in control of how and whether that data ought to be circulated, collected, and analyzed. I argue that silence is a temporary but crucial digital intervention that allows the user a previously unrealized opportunity to take digital privacy into her own hands. This technological intervention is particularly important because it prevents data from being mishandled, mistreated, and, as such, misplaced and mishandled in the sea of data noise.
