The Politics and Ethics of Listening in the Digital Age

Dr Kate Lacey, Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies, University of Sussex

Listening has long been overlooked in both studies of the media and conceptualisations of the public sphere. It is a curious oversight, given the centrality of listening to communicative, experiential and public life. In fact, acoustic metaphors resonate through discussions of electronic and digital culture, so ‘listening’ rather than ‘reading’ might seem the appropriate term to encapsulate engagement with digital and electronic ‘texts’, in as much as it brings together notions of embodiment, intersubjectivity, liveliness and sensory perception with notions of an active and critical disposition. In other words, just as the term ‘audience’ has been appropriated in relation to visual as well as audio media, so ‘listening’ becomes an appropriate term for engagement with all media in the age of convergence.

The paper will set a discussion of listening in the digital age within a broader discussion of the ‘modernisation’ of listening since the revolutionary introduction of recorded and broadcast sound around the turn of the last century, and hopes to demonstrate that thinking about listening as an activity in public life opens up profound questions for the understanding of mediated experience, civic engagement and media ethics.

For further information contact Julie Doyle, j.doyle@brighton.ac.uk