Recently, in the New York Times, sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh blamed iPods for keeping Americans from rising up in protest about America’s recent economic turmoil. “In public spaces,” he wrote, “serendipitous interaction is needed to create the ‘mob mentality.’ Most iPod-like devices separate citizens from one another; you can’t join someone in a movement if you can’t hear the participants.”
We can again hear strains that the Walkman (or its more robust technological offspring) inhibits social interaction, impedes participation in civic life, and otherwise distracts people from paying attention to something more important than their favorite song. Cultural Studies scholar Rey Chow has written that this kind of “distracted listening” represents a political statement, of sorts, a refusal to participate in mainstream sonic-social discourse.
I disagree. Chow misses the fact that both the music and the technology on which it relies are embedded in other circuits of capital and power, thus making it impossible to be fully distracted—you are always “hearing” the technology as noise in the cultural circuit. If the technology itself were mute, then listening to a Walkman would be the same as listening to anything else (a portable stereo, a transistor radio, a loudspeaker).
It’s not. Listening to a Walkman is a particular kind of listening, and listening to an iPod is yet another. It is perfectly postmodern, insofar as this kind of listening always calls attention to the material condition of the act of listening itself (this is why Apple’s white earbuds were such a brilliant advertising move). Similarly, the Walkman is a beautiful artifact of late liberal culture, with its emphasis on individual choice and fulfillment; with my Walkman, I only need to hear what I want to hear, provided I’ve paid for it.
Yet, the beauty of the Walkman, further elaborated by the iPod, is that it is often mobilized as a refusal of those same cultural contexts. Every act of listening performs tensions between what one hears and how one hears it, between where one is and what one is attending to, between what one wants to hear (my music) and what one hears (the technology), between connecting with my environment and being distanced from it, with little or no hope for reconciliation.
Nevertheless, I keep listening, and perhaps those tensions keep me listening, so that I might hear a little better the spaces between the notes, the pauses between the words, the gaps between what I hear and how I hear it.
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