Raiding the inarticulate since 2010

accelerated academy acceleration agency AI Algorithmic Authoritarianism and Digital Repression archer Archive Archiving artificial intelligence automation Becoming Who We Are Between Post-Capitalism and Techno-Fascism big data blogging capitalism ChatGPT claude Cognitive Triage: Practice, Culture and Strategies Communicative Escalation and Cultural Abundance: How Do We Cope? Corporate Culture, Elites and Their Self-Understandings craft creativity critical realism data science Defensive Elites Digital Capitalism and Digital Social Science Digital Distraction, Personal Agency and The Reflexive Imperative Digital Elections, Party Politics and Diplomacy digital elites Digital Inequalities Digital Social Science Digital Sociology digital sociology Digital Universities elites Fragile Movements and Their Politics Cultures generative AI higher education Interested labour Lacan Listening LLMs margaret archer Organising personal morphogenesis Philosophy of Technology platform capitalism platforms Post-Democracy, Depoliticisation and Technocracy post-truth psychoanalysis public engagement public sociology publishing Reading realism reflexivity scholarship sexuality Shadow Mobilization, Astroturfing and Manipulation Social Media Social Media for Academics social media for academics social ontology social theory sociology technology The Content Ecosystem The Intensification of Work theory The Political Economy of Digital Capitalism The Technological History of Digital Capitalism Thinking trump twitter Uncategorized work writing zizek

Do iPods block out internal conversation?

This is a claim my supervisor has made from time to time. It’s one I’ve tended to be rather sceptical of but it came to mind earlier when I was walking home, with no music as a result of having forgotten to pickup headphones when I left the house. To say that listening to music on headphones ‘blocks out internal conversation’ is not to suggest that we cease thought or feeling when listening to music. In fact the process of walking and listening to music (one of my favourite things in the world on a sunny day) is usually  emotionally and perceptually rich – take this for example, a song which for some reason is tied up in my mind with walking around on hot summers days but also tangled up with memories of various gigs in different cities and a couple of quite distinct periods of my life:

But what happens to my internal monologue when I’m walking along on a summer’s day listening to this song? It struck me earlier that I entirely see my supervisor’s point. My experience is of feelings and thoughts drifting in certain directions as a result of the music and the meaning (or lack thereof) past experience has embedded into it for me. But what inner monologue remains, if any, seems staccato and disjointed. Whereas earlier today when I found myself very aware of not having music for a 40 min walk (habitually I just would have music with me without thinking about it) I had a long drawn out inner dialogue about various things that have been on my mind recently. It’s this sort of dialogue through which we come to exercise agency (in that we decide on courses of action after deliberating internally about our circumstances and our concerns) and, if iPods do ‘blot this out’, it points to unacknowledged implications held by the ubiquity of this technology.