Rich Shivener, associate professor in York University's Writing Department, has been named a Mercator Fellow as part of an international research initiative studying how silence and noise influence human communication in digital and social environments.
The Mercator Fellowship is a competitive award that supports international research collaborations, allowing scholars to work with leading experts and research centres abroad. For Shivener, the fellowship connects him to an international project at the University of Konstanz: a Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) titled "Silence, Noise and Signal in Language."
Funded by the German Research Foundation, the CRC brings together more than 25 academics across 17 multi-year projects to explore how silence and disruption impact communication in settings such as gaming, social media and institutional life.
The project is organized around three key concepts. "Noise" refers to anything that interferes with or complicates interactions - such as ambiguity, misunderstanding or conflicting cues. "Silence," meanwhile, is not just the absence of communication, but can carry meaning depending on context. "Signal" refers to the message that emerges through - and is shaped by - these conditions.
Shivener's path toward this international and interdisciplinary collaboration began in 2025, when he participated in the Ontario Baden-Württemberg Faculty Research Exchange - a program funded by the Ontario Colleges, Universities, Research Excellence and Security. While conducting a pilot study on virtual reality and social deduction gaming at Konstanz, he was invited to review the CRC proposal.
His involvement was requested due to his ongoing research into how people create and interpret meaning in technologically mediated environments through writing and conversation. He has examined this topic in studies about emotional writing practices, virtual reality and digital games and through books such as Living Digital Media and Digital Literacies for Human Connection.
The Konstanz researchers saw a conceptual fit and went a step further than their invitation to review the proposal; they asked him to join the project as a collaborator, if it was funded.
Shivener, who teaches in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, was intrigued. He had observed in interviews how absence of noise can create space for participants to reflect and respond. In virtual or in-person social deduction games, focused on reading and influencing others, he had also seen how players use noise to redirect blame or build trust.
Shivener was also enthusiastic about the chance to work across disciplines and across countries. "International collaboration is a chance to meld our theories and methods in ways that simply don't happen when you're working within a single institution or tradition," he says.
Now that the CRC has been approved and funded, Shivener has been appointed as a fellow through to 2029. He will contribute to the sub-project "Ambiguous Signals: Exploring Noise and Silence in Gaming."
"Silence and noise are powerful means of persuasion. They also function differently depending on the context," explains Shivener. His work will focus on both analog and digital games as sites for exploring how those elements influence communication.
For example, in the video game Among Us, players take hidden roles on a spaceship. They try to identify who is sabotaging the crew while keeping their own role secret. In this kind of game, players use silence, misleading statements and other cues to influence others and interpret intentions, showing how noise and silence carry meaning and affect interactions. Synchronized video recordings and close observation of people playing will be used in the research inquiry to see how these elements emerge, are interpreted and influence the flow of play.
Insights from his work will feed into the broader goals of the CRC, and help researchers understand how silence, noise and signal operate in other social context - from online discussions and social media to workplace and institutional communication. In these settings, ambiguity and interpretation similarly affect human interaction.
Therein lies the impact Shivener hopes his work - and the CRC's - may have over the next years on a broader level.
"The results of studying social deduction games, for example, have relevance to understanding how we speak and write to each other in times of political and interpersonal conflict," he says. "I hope that we can call further attention to the problems and affordances of silence and noise across everyday situations."
This story was originally featured in YFile, York University's community newsletter.
