Mahadi Hasan
It was a quiet evening. I was watching a nature documentary, the kind that lets you breathe slowly, hear the rustle of leaves, the soft hum of the forest. And then, boom! An ad for gas relief medicine exploded through my ears. A man shouting, a woman laughing unnaturally, bright graphics flashing on screen. My finger rushed to skip, but the silence was already gone. That’s when it hit me- `Silence is dying`. Not just in our homes, but in our entire media ecosystem.
Once, silence was a sign of thought. It meant reflection, and space. Now, it feels like a glitch. If your video doesn’t have background music, if your podcast pauses for more than two seconds, if your news anchor takes a breath too long, people just scroll away. We’ve built a culture where quiet moments are treated as mistakes.
We are living in an age where noise has become the new normal. Not the kind we hear, but the kind we consume. Every headline screams for attention. Every YouTube thumbnail glows like a carnival light. Every TikTok tries to outdo the previous one in speed, sound, and energy. Even the news has turned into a competition of `volume-the sound’- not of value.
Once we used to wait for the morning newspaper. Now, our pockets vibrate every few minutes with ‘breaking news’. The world doesn’t break that often, but our concentration surely does. The media no longer simply reports stories; it demands attention.
`Calm doesn’t sell. Chaos does.’ That’s the brutal algorithmic truth of our time.
How we got here
Somewhere between curiosity and competition, journalism lost its pause button. When every outlet fights to be first, the easiest shortcut is to be the loudest. To provoke outrage, to amplify drama, to create noise that feels like importance.
And we, the audience, are not innocent either. We’ve become addicted to alerts, updates, and reactions. Silence makes us uneasy. We scroll endlessly, not because we care deeply, but because quiet moments feel strange now. Silence means slow, and we are rushing, don’t know where- just running in our mind. The result is a kind of mental noise that never stops. We know a little about everything, but understand very little of anything. The constant flood of sound and information has made our minds restless and tired.
All this comes with a cost. A deep one. We’re more ‘connected’ than ever, yet we hear each other less. We know the headlines, but not the stories behind them. The constant buzz has made our minds restless and incapable of stillness.
Researchers call it information fatigue. I call it spiritual exhaustion. Because when you are surrounded by noise long enough, you forget what peace sounds like. Even as teachers, journalists, or students, we see it daily. Classrooms filled with multitasking minds, unable to focus. Newsrooms chasing trends, not truths. It’s as if silence has become too heavy to carry.
But here’s the paradox; silence is not the enemy of communication. It’s the foundation of it.
Without silence, words lose their meaning. Without pauses, stories lose their rhythm. The greatest speeches, the most powerful interviews, all use silence as their punctuation.
Maybe it’s time media remembers that. Not everything needs to go viral. Not every second needs a sound. Sometimes the best journalism is not the one that shouts, but the one that listens.
As a teacher, I often tell my students that learning to pause is one of the hardest but most important skills. In the rush to produce, post, and publish, we forget to reflect. Yet reflection is what separates noise from insight. We don’t need more voices competing for attention. We need more thoughtful ones. We don’t need to fill every second with sound. We need to make room for understanding. When my students ask how to become better storytellers, I tell them something simple: Learn to pause, learn to listen. Listen. Think. Let the silence do its part. Because the world doesn’t need more voices, it needs more meaning. Perhaps the future of good journalism won’t belong to those who shout the loudest, but to those who can stay calm amid the chaos.
The writer is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Communication and Media Studies at University of Development Alternative
