Silence Inside Systems: Roots and Generativity Consequences

Silence as a system behavior has evaded attention in information systems (IS) discourse, where interaction predominates. It merits examination as systems grow brittle, brute-force countermeasures falter, and autonomous systems risk misbehaving. We conceptualize silence as dynamic system-wide behavior, theorizing how it drives IS generativity by coalescing developers’ attention on temporally shifting slivers of a system’s codebase. Using a supercomputer-scale model, we analyzed nearly 20 million tweaks over a quarter of a century in over a thousand systems, constructing 67,000+ evolving human-to-artifact networks to infer such behavioral dynamics. We show that silence breeds generativity by dynamically funneling developers’ attention. We make three contributions. First, we introduce silence as a dynamic system-wide behavior rooted in system architecture. Second, we show silence’s generativity consequences—halving degenerativity, doubling evolution speed, quadrupling releases, and spawning 600 times as many forks. Third, we uncover attention funneling as the mechanism linking silence to generativity.

History: Yulin Fang, Senior Editor; Magnus Mähring, Associate Editor.