Blog 07

Crawford talks about social media and the importance of the listener and audience in social media. The idea of “speaking up” and using one’s voice is often the most common an acknowledged way people participate in social media; however, “lurking” is also important for the continued growth of and participation in social media. The people who lurk are providing an audience for those “speaking up” to preform to and get reactions from, encouraging them to continue to share. Without people listening, social medias would die out; lurkers “contribute a mode of receptiveness that encourages others to make public contributions” (81). Twitter, as a social media, also plays off the idea of sound with its name; Twitter can apply to the “calling of birds, or the ‘idle’ chatter of humans” (83). The constant chatter of humans can be both entertaining and difficult to navigate and understand with “a stream of multilayered information” (83). One can have a tweet about a celebrity blog, political news, and a picture of a dog doing something crazy all in the span of seconds. This complex of information allows for many Twitter users to establish different types of relationships with the social media. Many will choose to share personal information while others choose to retweet other people’s thoughts or not post at all. However, all “disclosure made in social media spaces develop a relationship with an audience of listeners” (83). However, in 2009, when the piece was written, the norms of social media had not yet developed, leaving the relationship between audience and speaker unclear and difficult to define. In recent year, the increase in participation in social media has developed more norms. Corporations and politicians struggle to keep balanced communication with their audience with the growth in the platforms, so the expectation for constant responses has gone down. Therefore, they have moved to using their social medias for promotions and marketing. Individual users have also been able to set their own standard for how they are going to participate in social media. Lurking is no longer seen as a drain on social media; it has even been glorified. Many people openly enjoy, and even pride themselves in, being able to stalk other people. Therefore, the relationship between listener and audience can defined by the individual, breaking away from the idea of a norm. 

The human voice is something that we are constantly surrounded with, yet we never think of it as what it truly is. In the words of Mladen Dolar, the human voice “…functions as the bearer of an utterance, the support of a word, a sentence, a discourse, any kind of linguistic expression” (540). He forces the reader to stop, think, and look at how voice is used in the human sense, as a vessel to carry meaning. Dolar also touches on the individuality of the voice, which relates closely to Cavarero’s idea of the “uniqueness” of the voice. However, Dolar takes this idea of the voice being “like a fingerprint” and applies it to his original thought of voice itself being without meaning and “not linguistically relevant” (545). This is different from Cavarero’s idea of the singing woman and the king, because the singing voice, to Cavarero and the king in the story, has a relevance and joy, “enjoying the sound of the ‘vibration of a throat of flesh'” (521). It’s possible that Dolar finds the voice enjoyable, but in his argument, the voice is nothing more than “the instrument, the vehicle, the medium” to deliver the meaning, and the “jungle” of noise that is nothing more than just that (541). This is different from Cavarero’s argument because to Cavarero, the voice holds uniqueness and that uniqueness is something worth enjoying, something “alive and bodily” (521). It’s possible that the idea of enjoyable voice would just get in the way of Dolar’s argument on voice being linguistically not relevant, but it’s interesting to see how uniqueness can be looked at from two entirely different angles.

In her piece, “Following You: Disciplines of Listening in Social Media” Kate Crawford describes how the rise of social media has affected how people communicate with one another. Crawford focuses on the idea of listening and using one’s voice as it applies to social media. Crawford using these words to describe online experiences is not a novel idea. In fact, it is how most people would refer to their interactions on social media. It is interesting to use auditory language to describe something that is almost completely visual. As Sterne says in his introduction, hearing is inescapable but seeing can be selective. Crawford seems to be describing a type of “listening” that is selective. She seems to define listening as someone who is engaged in reading social media posts (ex. on Twitter) and interacting (by liking or commenting.) These small things are mimicking an in-person conversation. People not interacting with posts or just browsing through a few posts on their feed are engaging in “background listening” this is the kind of listening that is more selective. She describes it as someone reading pieces of tweets or just opening the social media page and drifting to and from it as you do other things. This is the equivalent of being present with someone talking but focusing on other things–you are only picking up on pieces of the conversation. She also talks about the idea of using your “voice” on social media. She describes how often when people say they want to use their “voice” on social media it has a political charge behind it. She seems to think that thinking about voice in this way is impersonal. This reminds me of Cavarero’s argument that says the words that people say are not unique but the voices that speak them are.

All of the things that Crawford described in her 2009 piece are still true in 2018, just worse. People are more distracted than ever because social media is more prevalent than ever. I find it interesting that she finds it impersonal when a politician or celebrity posts something on social media, and this is most likely because she is coming from a time where the most popular way for those people to communicate was on the radio or tv, but to me these famous people posting on social media feels like a personal connection to their followers.

The voice is an interesting concept with a wide array of definitions. Dolar wrote an interesting piece titled The Linguistics of The Voice that identified several new aspects of voice. Also, Aristotle in his paper Aristotle On Voice described his definition of voice which is more limited in comparison with Dolar’s. In his essay, Dolar described what he termed ‘a dichotomy of the voice and the signifier’. For instance, “… Voice is what does not contribute to meaning… The signifier possesses a logic, it can be dissected, it can be pinned down and fixed…”(Dolar542). With this distinction Dolar is trying to analyze voice as a non-definable entity that brings about a certain meaning or intent to a listener without actually influencing anything. Meanwhile, the signifier is meant to contribute to the meaning because this concept incorporates the clarity of what is being conveyed.

Furthermore, Aristotle uses voice to encompass a smaller meaning. Aristotle emphasizes that voice is nothing more than the meaning behind what is being said. He writes, “Voice is a kind of sound characteristic of what has soul in it,”(Aristotle669). However, this simplifies voice as nothing more than the mental process behind what is being said. There is not a connection to the physical aspect of voice, instead, that is acknowledged as sound. A sneeze does not have any meaning or mental process behind it and is, thus, not part of a voice. Therefore, Aristotle uses the term voice to explain what Dolar uses the signifier for; the former does not, however, explain what Dolar terms as the voice, which forces us to re-assess our definition for the term.

 

In her piece, Following You, author Kate Crawford discusses different types of listening on social media. The three types are “reciprocal listening, background listening, and delegated listening.” The originally positive “background listening” that Crawford uses to describe the behavior of users on social media in 2009 has become a major negative in 2018—both for the individual and for the community at large. Crawford describes background listening as conversations that “continue as a backdrop throughout the day, with only a few moments requiring concentrated attention.” As social media has become a bigger and bigger milieu for online discussion, background listening has become a dangerous concept for two reasons.

First, as more and more information becomes only available on the internet, people come to rely on the internet as a major source of information. Thus, if people are not giving full attention to the information they are constantly processing, they can transmit the wrong information, sort of like an Arabic telephone. This misunderstanding is one of the major factors that led to the Fake News epidemic which began in 2015. It is much easier to slip in falsities and spread them around if people are only half listening.

Second, something that is a major problem for me, is that, because of social media running in the background, it is difficult to dedicate full attention to other things. Even as I write this blog post, I have flitted back in forth between Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat. If I didn’t have these distractions it would be much easier to create a logical, coherent, argumentative  post because I would be giving it my full attention 100% of the time.

 

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.