Silent presence

This Christianity Today piece - The Media and the Massacre: True compassion requires turning off the news seems to me to be worth reading and thinking about:

Not a single person in that airport was assisted in any way by these ghastly disclosures, pat press releases, and offensive atheologies. But this is the ironclad logic of continuous broadcasting: Broadcasting must be continuous. Someone must always be saying something even when there is nothing new to say. The most basic lesson for those who would comfort the victims of tragedy is that the first, best response to tragedy is presence, and often the best form of presence is silence. The grieving, the sick, and the dying sometimes need our words, sometimes need our touch, but almost always they need our presence. And there is no contradiction between presence and silence in the embodied life for which we were all created, to which we are all called, into which God himself entered. Bodies can be present without a word. That is the beauty of bodies.
Mediated communication, on the other hand—any form of communication that places something "in the middle," between persons—cannot abide silence. Radio hates dead air. Television hates sound without movement. ... silence is not an option in social media. Not to tweet or post or blog is not to be silently present—it is to be mutely absent.

Silence also seems useful in other areas - the world could stand not only a more prominent presence with the grieving but more contemplation as well.