channels of communication. But the pseudorealities created by the media are still there "and the world is structured to believe in them." She argues that images from afar have taken over much of our everyday reality like an immensely powerful occupation force. "And somewhere, someone will have to ask, 'How come the right to change our mental environment—to change the constructs of our minds and the sounds around us—seems to have been given away without anybody's consent?'" Silence and the commons "Silence," Franklin writes, "possesses striking similarities [to] aspects of life and community, such as unpolluted water, air, or soil, that were once taken as normal and given, but have become special and precious in technologically mediated environments." She argues that the technological ability to separate recorded sound from its source makes the sound as permanent as the Muzak that plays endlessly in public places without anyone's consent. For Franklin, such canned music is a manipulative technology programmed to generate predictable emotional responses and to increase private profit. She compares this destruction of silence to the British enclosure laws which fenced off the commons for private farming. Franklin maintains that the core of the strength of silence is its openness to unplanned events. Quakers, she writes, worship God in collective silence. "I think that if any one of you attended a Quaker meeting, particularly on a regular basis," she told a 1993 conference on acoustic ecology, "you would find that suddenly, out of the silence, someone will speak about something that had just entered your mind. It's an uncanny thing, but the strength of collective silence is probably one of the most powerful spiritual forces." Franklin advocates defending the human right to public silence—negotiating one music-free elevator for example, or lobbying for quiet rooms in public buildings. She also recommends starting and ending meetings with a few minutes of silence. Personal life In 1952, Ursula Franklin married Fred Franklin (born 1921), an engineer of German Jewish ancestry who had been exposed to Quakerism while living in England, where he had been sent to boarding school to escape the Nazis in 1936 and remained until emigrating to Canada in 1948. They had no family in Canada and, after their two children were born, they searched for a spiritual home and joined the Society of Friends (Quakers) in 1964. "We were pacifists before we were Quakers," Franklin says, "but it was a