Me v/s Me: When Everyone is Speaking
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So you say nothing. The conversation moves on.
Nothing dramatic has happened. No one has shouted. No one has stormed out. There are no opposing camps, no protest signs, no comment section wars. Yet, somewhere between the thought forming in your head and the words never leaving your mouth, a position has already been taken.
We usually imagine polarisation as something loud. We picture political debates, angry social media outbursts, and people determined to prove the other side wrong. Polarisation seems to announce itself. But perhaps it is also visible in quieter moments: the conversation we decide is not worth having, the opinion we soften before saying aloud or the topic we know better than to bring up at dinner.
Silence, in these moments, is not necessarily agreement. It may be discomfort, uncertainty, self-preservation, or simply exhaustion. But whatever its reason, silence does something. It determines what enters the conversation and what stays outside it.
The group chat is not silent.
Someone sends a political opinion you strongly disagree with. Your first instinct is to reply. You type a paragraph, read it twice, and imagine the responses that might follow. Someone will misunderstand you. Someone will send a screenshot, or someone will make it personal. Someone will send a 5 minute voice note.
You delete the message.
The absence of your message may have looked like neutrality from the outside. But internally, there was hardly anything neutral about the moment. There was disagreement, followed by a calculation: Is saying what I think worth what might happen next?
Erving Goffman’s work on the ‘Presentation of Self’ helps us understand this everyday negotiation. Social interaction involves managing how we appear to others, and what we reveal and conceal becomes part of how we maintain relationships and identities (Goffman, 1959). Silence, then, can become another way of managing the self. We not only ask, “What do I think?”, we also ask, “What will saying this make me look like?”
But there is something more unsettling about that deleted message. Your silence does not remain yours.
Imagine that seventeen people have seen the original message and nobody responds. The little ‘seen’ sits beneath it. What does that silence mean? Do seventeen people agree? Do seventeen people disagree? Are they uncomfortable? Are they waiting for someone else to speak first? No one knows.
Yet the absence of disagreement can begin to look like agreement.
This is where Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann’s concept of the Spiral of Silence becomes useful (Noelle-Neumann, 1974). She proposed that people may become less willing to express opinions when they believe their position is unpopular, partly because of the possibility of social isolation (Noelle-Neumann, 1974). Research has found this tendency in online as well as offline settings. A 2014 Pew Research Center survey of 1,801 American adults examining discussion around the Edward Snowden revelations found that people were less willing to discuss the issue when they believed those around them disagreed with them. Only 42% of Facebook and Twitter users surveyed said they would post about the issue on social media, compared with the 86% who said they would be willing to discuss it in person (Hampton et al., 2014).
The important part is not simply that people go quiet. It is what their quietness can make the room look like.
Someone stays silent because they think everyone disagrees with them. Another person, hearing no disagreement, assumes everyone agrees. A third person notices the apparent consensus and decides not to challenge it.
The room looks more united than it actually is.
Silence, then, does not merely reflect what people think. Sometimes, it shapes what people believe other people think.
When Neutrality Becomes Visible
“I don’t get involved in politics.” It sounds like stepping outside the argument.
And sometimes, it is. People may be genuinely uncertain, uninterested, exhausted by political confrontation or simply unwilling to turn every social interaction into a debate. Treating every silence as a hidden agreement would make the idea of neutrality far too simple.
The more interesting question is not whether neutrality is real. It is what happens when neutrality becomes visible.
Consider Ed Sheeran’s recent tour controversy. In September 2026, rapper Macklemore was removed from Sheeran’s U.S. tour after making pro-Palestinian remarks during a performance. Sheeran subsequently said that the decision was made by the tour promoter and venues rather than by him, and said he had tried to mediate the situation. Several supporting acts later withdrew from the tour in solidarity with Macklemore (Reuters, 2026; The Guardian, 2026).
Sheeran has initially positioned his concerts as spaces intended to bring people together rather than become political arenas. Yet the controversy eventually drew him directly into the politics he had tried to keep outside the concert. At a later Philadelphia performance, he addressed the humanitarian situation in Gaza, calling it ‘catastrophic and unjustifiable’, while also speaking about his desire for his shows to remain spaces of unity (Associated Press, 2026).
Whether one agrees with his approach is not the point here.
What is sociologically interesting is the difficulty of performing neutrality when everyone is watching.
For an ordinary person, saying “I don’t get involved in politics” may simply end a conversation. For someone with millions of followers, a decision not to speak, a decision to speak and even a decision about how to speak can itself become part of the conversation.
The tension is almost unavoidable. The more publicly visible you are, the harder it becomes to remain invisible within a political conversation.
And this takes us back to Goffman. We are not only expressing opinions; we are also managing identities. The person at the dinner table may want to remain the ‘easy-going’ sibling. The person in the group chat may not want to become ‘the political one’. The celebrity may want to remain an artist rather than a political figure.
Sometimes, silence is less about having no position than about deciding which version of ourselves we want other people to see.
The Beliefs We Inherit
But perhaps the most complicated silence is not between two people. It is inside one.
We grow up surrounded by opinions before we are old enough to call them opinions. Families, schools, neighbourhoods, religions, friendships, social media, and communities give us ideas about what is normal, respectable, embarrassing, progressive, traditional, acceptable, or unacceptable.
At first, these ideas rarely feel like beliefs that we have chosen. They simply feel like the way things are. Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘doxa’ describes those taken for granted assumptions that appear natural rather than socially constructed (Bourdieu, 1977). We do not constantly question them because, for the most part, we do not experience them as questions. Until something disrupts them…..
Maybe it is a conversation with a friend. A lecture, a book, a relationship, a political event. A sentence that stays in your head much longer than it should. And suddenly, something you have always accepted becomes something you have to think about.
This is where polarisation can become strangely personal. The ‘other’ side is no longer only another person on a screen. It might be an older version of yourself. It might be your family’s opinion sitting beside your own. It might be the belief you inherited and the belief you are slowly constructing for yourself. You may disagree with something and still feel attached to the people who taught it to you. You may change your mind and still feel uncomfortable admitting that you have. You may believe something strongly but hesitate to say it because it conflicts with the identity you have built around yourself. The conflict becomes less about winning an argument and more about figuring out who you allow yourself to become.
The Classroom Nobody Answers In
There is another kind of silence that is almost painfully familiar.
A professor asks a difficult question in class. Everyone looks around. You think you know the answer. Someone beside you probably does too. But nobody raises a hand.
You begin wondering whether you have misunderstood the question. Then you wonder whether your answer will sound obvious. Someone else might disagree. The room is quiet, so perhaps everyone else knows something you do not.
The professor waits. Still nothing. Eventually, the conversation moves on.
This is not necessarily polarisation. But it shows the same social mechanism i.e., what we say depends partly on the audience we imagine is listening.
Goffman helps us see the performance involved in these small interactions, while the Spiral of Silence helps explain why perceived social consensus can discourage expression (Goffman, 1959; Noelle-Neumann, 1974). The silence of the room becomes information in itself.
And sometimes, that information is misleading. Perhaps everyone had something to say. Perhaps everyone was simply waiting for someone else to say it first.
The Argument Inside The Silence
Maybe, then, polarisation is not always about choosing between two clearly defined sides. Sometimes, it is about the uncomfortable distance between them.
It exists in the person who laughs at a joke they found offensive, because explaining why would make the room uncomfortable. It exists in the person who says they do not care about politics but spends ten minutes rewriting a message because they are afraid of how their opinions will be received. It exists in the person who discovers that a belief they inherited no longer fits the person they are becoming.
None of this means that every silence must be broken. There are conversations we are not ready for, relationships we choose to protect, and moments when saying nothing is a legitimate choice. Speaking is not automatically courageous and silence is not automatically cowardly.
But perhaps we should stop imagining silence as empty. Because even when everyone at the table appears to agree, there may be someone quietly disagreeing. Even when someone says they are neutral, there may be a complicated calculation behind that neutrality.
And even when there are supposedly two sides, the most difficult argument may be taking place somewhere else entirely, inside a person trying to reconcile what they were taught, what they believe, what they feel, and who they want to be.
The room may be quiet. The conversation may have moved on. But that does not mean the argument has ended. Sometimes, it has only moved somewhere no one else can hear.
References
Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge University Press.
Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Doubleday.
Noelle-Neumann, E. (1974). The spiral of silence: A theory of public opinion. Journal of Communication, 24(2), 43–51. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1974.tb00367.x
Pew Research Center. (2014, August 26). Social media and the spiral of silence. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2014/08/26/social-media-and-the-spiral-of-silence/
Reuters. (2026, September 15). Ed Sheeran says dropping Macklemore from U.S. tour was not his decision. Reuters.
Associated Press. (2026, September 18). [Article on Ed Sheeran addressing Gaza/Macklemore controversy]. AP News.
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