differential meanings collapse

Happy to be finally aboard here with all you fellow Chippies. I’d like to call your attention to a book I recently read entitled Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life by Michael Bull, reader in Media and Film Studies at the University of Sussex. I’ll be doing a few posts about this book because there’s just so much to talk about.

The book is an in-depth analysis of many aspects of “personal stereo” use in urban life. (He uses the term “personal stereo” throughout the book rather than Walkman or iPod, those being trademarked names. In fact in the preface he states “…the Sony Corporation were not willing for the author to use the term in either the title of the book or its content… Rather than displaying any antipathy towards learned books, Sony appears to be concerned that, by giving permission to use the trademark in this instance, they might thereby compromise their ability to defend that trademark against other companies’ use of it in the future.”)

The later part of the book I found to be the most interesting. It's made up of some great chapters like “Aestheticizing Everyday Life: A Critique,” “Visual Theories of City Life and Personal-Stereo Use” and “Technology and the Management of Everyday Life.” Bull discusses in these chapters how listeners construct an “aesthetic” experience by the act of using a personal-stereo in otherwise “meaningless”, “random” or “chaotic” everyday goings-ons. Here’s a good excerpt:
“Personal-stereo users are, as I have noted, skilled strategists of auditory looking. The act of 'looking' to manufactured sound is inscribed in the behaviour of any citizen who has grown up with television, film and video and this is reinforced as they move around urban spaces with its canned music filling public spaces. An integral part of these mediums is the musical soundtrack that accompanies them, supplementing the narrative and giving an emotionally heightened expression to the image.”

Bull brings up Norman Denzin, an author of a book called The Cinematic Society as well as the situationist writings of Debord in the 1960s in the discussion of aestheticizing everyday experience. Denzin writes “Reality as it was visually experienced, became a staged social production. Real, everyday experiences came to be judged against their staged, cinematic, video counterpart. The metaphor of the dramaturgical society, or ‘life as theater’ ceased to be just a metaphor. It became an interactional reality.”

And Debord, “In societies where modern conditions prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into representation.” “…the spectacle is the dominant mode through which people relate to one another. It is only through the spectacle that people acquire a [falsified] knowledge of certain aspects of social life…”

I’ll post more on this later, but this book really opened my eyes to an area I hadn’t quite thought about before. Media and technology have quite significantly affected our perception and the way we relate to the world and each other. This book was written in 2000 and raises even more questions now, with media saturation and self-reference becoming more and more part of life. And of course the internet!?!?