Orphic Media: Listening, Attention, and Non-Informatic Mediation

• In Event: Media Studies Interruptions of STS - I

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic and archival research into ubiquitous but little-examined sound technologies used to control affective relations, this paper argues for an “orphic" conception of media—one that views the primary central purpose of media technologies as the management of affective relations rather than the transmission of information. Like Orpheus fighting the Sirens’ song with the sound of his lyre, users of noise-canceling headphones, tinnitus maskers, white noise machines, nature sound mobile apps, and in-ear smart technologies (“hearables”) sonically fabricate a safe space for the self. Since the early 1960s, Americans have used orphic media to increase their sense of personal ability, responding to an ideological ableism that fears difference in human bodies, the postwar disruption of spatial coherence and social stability, and a neoliberal information economy that demands individualized attention and, therefore, the suppression of audible difference as unwanted noise.
The freedom not to hear currently feels so necessary to so many in part because the digital has pushed post-Enlightenment utilitarian logic beyond human limits—amplifying the spatial, temporal, and economic pressures of nineteenth- and twentieth-century capitalism. An orphic conception of media critiques a culture of “flow” that understands information as an ontology rather than a technology, judging human performance and worth by information’s immaterial, inhuman standard, and discarding material difference as noise. Informatic paradigms within media and technology studies often confuse the critical study of information capitalism, not unlike using the paradigm of the Invisible Hand to interrogate the free market system.

Author

• Mack Hagood, Miami University