Crawford is the first of the essayists to bring sound studies into the 21st century, so already she is making connections that we haven’t thought of as much, most notably, the new meanings she brings to voice, sound, and listening.
In Crawford’s essay, social media becomes a platform to be heard and to hear. Now anyone can say anything they want, and anyone can find it. It’s no longer an limited circle of people who we can pick and choose to listen to us, although most social media platforms have an option to be “private.” Our circles have broaden all over the world, and as who’s listening to us has increased, so has the people we “listen” to, and Crawford brings up this point as she discusses the “conversations” we have on social media. She compares our Twitter feeds to the radio, a constant environment of sound that we can always have access to. It’s here that Crawford reimagines what listening is, because she describes our interaction with our Twitter feed as listening. And much like the way we sometimes listen to the radio, Crawford claims that we passively tune into our feeds. Instead of a constant stream of actual sound/noise, our Twitter’s provide us a constant stream of text, and in a way, we passively listen to it, letting the notifications pop onto our screens without focusing on them. Occasionally we will click on a post and read it, but it becomes “background noise” to us.
I think in some ways, this claim is still true, especially in the ways that social media has desensitized our generation by providing unlimited access to things. Hashtags for disasters are just a daily thing, to the point where sometimes it becomes a feeling of “oh, just another one.” For me, a lot of social media just becomes something I can go to when I’m bored or listless and want something in the background.
