In Crawford’s piece “Following You: Disciplines of Listening in Social Media” she touches on how “online participation has tended to be conflated with contributing a ‘voice’” (80). This is true in such examples as tweeting your opinions or commenting your thoughts, and I believe still holds true today, in 2018. However, she also discusses the idea about listening and social media. I think this is a concept that has been changed throughout time. To me, I take “listening” to be more of a quiet role and a few years back, in the early 2000s the word for such a person was a “lurker”. She talks about how linguistically, “lurker” has such negative connotations, but “listener” is more positive. Today in social media, more attention is given to those who “speak out” and therefore have a voice, but I think it is also very important to be a listener. Being a listener and having a voice are actually connected as Crawford writes, “The concept of listening… invokes the more dynamic process of online attention, and suggests that it is an embedded part of network engagement- a necessary corollary to having a ‘voice’” (82). Even if the world is changing to a more “online” sphere focused on social media, the ideas of voice (sound and speaking) and listening are still important to human interaction and are a part of sound studies. As time goes on, change is inevitable, along with more technology, but as Sterne put it, “sound studies today is certainly an intellectual reaction to changes in culture and technology” (SSR, 3). The ideas of sound, listening, speaking, and voice will continue to be important even as social media continues to change our daily lives.
