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The need for companionable silence
from Victoria Ward, Saturday, October 11, 2008
A nice amplification of our enquiry is to be found in an article by Lynsey Hanley in the Guardian Review this weekend. A little less conversation holds out against Andy Burnham, the Culture Secretary. He’s been encouraging the Public Libraries Authority to make libraries less solemn and sombre.
Hanley’s article holds a very different opinion, suggesting that in a library you find a kind of companionable silence necessary to what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls ‘flow’:
How wrong can he be? What you need in a library…is the sense that everyone has come to this particular room in order to become so absorbed in alternative worlds that the one outside does not, for that time, exist. The alchemy between printed words and the imagination simply can’t take place if the outside world keeps piping up to let you know it’s still there.
I’m reminded of some research into desks and workspace that we did a few years back, during the course of which one person confessed to me that, although they had a desk, they’d nip off and hide at a hotdesk if they really needed to work, so no-one could find them.
Hanley goes on to talk about the invasion of thinking space that we
all require, at least some of the time, for truly productive lives….There is a slackening occurring, a relaxation of what ought to be universal goods, in order to accommodate the flakiness, the distractedness, of everyday life as it currently is.
Or, in the case of MLA’s investigations into knowledge transfer, everyday work.
I’d be interested to know, in a business context, what others think. Should hold onto the custodianship of companionable silence as a universal good? Should buzz and ‘joy and chatter’ is more to be prized. Backing up the Culture Secretary for a moment, I do also know that the British Library has had great success in making a buzz around it’s Business & IP Centre which has been designed to distinguish it from the hallowed recesses of the library collections and the reading rooms and encourages the kind of knowledge transfer around an event, or a speaker, which is also juicy and of value. Buzz or flow? Buzz and flow? Hot knowledge transfer & cool knowledge transfer?
Many people, in everyday life and in a working context crave the sort of quiet space that libraries provide. Others want noise and chatter. It will be interesting to see how public libraries find a language to market both within their offer.
