It was a bright, sunny day outside and I was sitting in class waiting for the lunch bell to ring. I remember because lunch was the time when everything happened; everyone sat with their friends; everyone tried to muscle their way into the serving line; everyone avoided the people that didn’t fit in, treating them as lepers to be cast out of the social hierarchy of the cafeteria. I knew from the time I was in third grade that I was different. I made friends with everyone and excluded no one. I abstained from making belittling comments towards the people that were traditionally picked on by the social elite. I enjoyed reading and going to school. I was never taught to be accepting of everyone – I just was. So when the girl with the awkward walk, too-long stringy blonde hair, and thick glasses walked into the room, I took it upon myself to sit with her. How I almost ended up in a fight I cannot recall, but I know it had something to do with defending her when others would not.
The second time this happened I was in seventh grade. I was sitting at a square, black-topped desk with three other classmates. Three girls and one boy were sitting at the table. One girl was known school-wide as the one you do not want to mess with. Naturally, being shorter and smaller than her I was afraid to go near her. I dreaded the thought of being in a group with her. My other group members did too, but they acted otherwise. One of the members of the group, a girl, was not doing the work correctly and the scary girl was yelling at her. Everyone in the group was silent. No one had the courage to tell the scary girl to stop yelling at our group member, especially not the boy. The boy thought it was funny. When I mustered up the voice and courage to say something, the girl was visibly thankful. The group, however, was shocked. “Why do you care?” was the look on their faces. “She is going to kill me, but something needs to be said” was the thought on my mind. Injustice and abuse of power continue to rile that same behavior from me today. Before I knew what it was, I was fighting against spiraling into silence.
In order to successfully persuade someone, you must convince them of something that they did not believe prior to your attempts at persuasion. If this person feels that their points are valid because they are based on fact gleaned from personal experiences, then they will be hard to convince, unless they are given new knowledge that contradicts their experiences. People believe in their experiences as being their own, so to tell them that their thoughts are not their own, that their thoughts have been influenced by the Media, is to sound like a heretic. Since it is unpopular to be outside of the majority, your beliefs will be unconvincing. You will be silenced. Those who become aware of this through experience are less likely to speak up again because they would feel that their beliefs will result in them becoming an outcast. This fear of isolation is one of the main tenets of the spiral of silence theory.
Elizabeth Noelle-Neumann was the first to describe the occurrence, suggesting that people fear isolation and withdraw their opinions if seen as unpopular. Self-expression becomes non-existent in such a context and the person in the dissenting opinion is excluded. Less confident in their own beliefs, they fall prey to the agenda of the Media, believing in their propaganda, quieting their own intellectual instincts. Some argue that this does not happen to the educated among us; young people and adults alike all speak up when they feel their voice is not being heard and they have something to contribute. This is not true for all young people, though. As much as the spiral of silence theory does not work in absolutes, one cannot negate this theory with a non-absolute. In contemporary society we see evidence of people not speaking up often.
When was the last time you stifled yourself for fear of being rejected by the crowd? What were the circumstances?
When was the first time you learned that not everything you say will be popular or agreed upon by all? How did it change you?
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