On my last visit to Manhattan I had a small revelation about the cost of quiet. There are thousands of bars and restaurants in New York, but if you want a quiet one—where you can have a conversation with a friend or be left alone with your martini and your thoughts—you are going to have to pay a lot for your drink. Only the high-end expensive restaurants seem to provide the possibility of calm. I find the same thing in London. Granted some of the hippest, most expensive restaurants are also deafeningly loud, but the quiet ones are almost exclusively the pricey ones.

I think that this is the only the beginning. As we start to understand the impact that technology and constantly being connected is having on our well being (cf, Does Technology Affect our Happiness), places of quiet and dis-connection are becoming more valuable and more expensive.

So what to do? The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual. (The Joy of Quiet)

Many will read this and see it as a call for more information literacy training. That is part of it – we need to teach people how to wade through all of this stuff that we are producing, but we also need to teach people how to leave all of the buzz behind and just think. At the risk of proliferating the image of the shushing librarian…this is why it is vital that our libraries remain quiet. Sure, put meeting rooms and group study rooms in the library–that is an important part of knowledge creation and innovation. But in the future we are going to need more and more quiet spaces to escape all of that as well. And our libraries will (hopefully) remain the last free (or at least affordable) place to disconnect and be quiet, to renew not just our intellect, but our lifelines.

We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say. Partly because we’re so busy communicating. And — as he might also have said — we’re rushing to meet so many deadlines that we hardly register that what we need most are lifelines. (Ibid.)