Abstract
The unpredictable duration of the COVID-19 pandemic necessitates renewed reflection on our collective reliance on video platforms such as Zoom and YouTube for telecommunication and music listening purposes, which have virtually filled the gap left by widely cancelled live performances. The affectively close relationship we forge with these services today echoes a recurrent theme in literary modernism: the tendency to endow early mechanical sound reproduction machines such as the phonograph and the record player with quasi-human subjectivity, emotions, and agency. This historical topos, in turn, anticipates posthumanism’s fascination with the seamless interface between machine-intelligence and its human users. Thinking about these cultural continuities may help the Humanities articulate the crucial role of media technologies and literary discourses under exceptional circumstances.
Highlights
Listening in Times of CrisisCritical paradigm shifts and new theories in the Humanities respond to social events, cultural upheavals, and political change, but they are inevitably, tinged by the personal experiences of scholars
Emeritus, The University of Alabama in Huntsville, 301 Sparkman Drive, Huntsville, AL 35899, USA; Phonographic Sound, and Nonhuman Agency.” Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature
Instead of authentically reproducing its users’ originally intended or artificially staged atmosphere—the affective, bodily immersive situation spontaneously and intuitively sensed by its participants in the shared space of a building or natural environment of their choosing—Zoom creates its own virtual atmosphere for us. It does so by cutting up the sense of physical presence, emotional nearness, and intellectual community created by face-to-face meetings into an objectifying gallery of isolated head shots that sadly mimics the COVID-19-induced social alienation in public life, even though Zoom promises to alleviate, rather than deepen, this condition
Summary
Critical paradigm shifts and new theories in the Humanities respond to social events, cultural upheavals, and political change, but they are inevitably, tinged by the personal experiences of scholars. Instead of authentically reproducing its users’ originally intended or artificially staged atmosphere—the affective, bodily immersive situation spontaneously and intuitively sensed by its participants in the shared space of a building or natural environment of their choosing—Zoom creates its own virtual atmosphere for us It does so by cutting up the sense of physical presence, emotional nearness, and intellectual community created by face-to-face meetings into an objectifying gallery of isolated head shots that sadly mimics the COVID-19-induced social alienation in public life, even though Zoom promises to alleviate, rather than deepen, this condition. Perhaps platforms such as Zoom, in turn, may become quasi-subjects in their own right?
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