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Smart radio and audio apps: the politics and paradoxes of listening to (anti-) social media

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journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-08, 20:22 authored by Kate LaceyKate Lacey
The recent crop of vocal social media applications tends to appeal to users in terms of getting their voices heard loud and clear. Indeed, it is striking how often verbs like ‘shout’ and ‘boast’ and ‘brag’ are associated with microcasting platforms with such noisy names as Shoutcast, Audioboom, Hubbub, Yappie, Boast and ShoutOmatic. In other words, these audio social media are often promoted in rather unsociable terms, appealing less to the promise of a new communicative exchange than to the fantasy that we will each can be at the centre of attention of an infinite audience. Meanwhile, many of the new forms of online radio sell their services to listeners as offering ‘bespoke’ or ‘responsive’ programming (or ‘audiofeeds’), building up a personal listening experience that meets their individual needs and predilictions. The role of listening in this new media ecology is characterised, then, by similarly contradictory trends. Listening is increasingly personalised, privatised, masterable and measurable, but also newly shareable, networked and, potentially, public. The promotional framing of these new media suggests a key contradiction at play in these new forms of radio and audio, speaking to a neo-liberal desire for a decentralization of broadcasting to the point where every individual has a voice, but where the idea of the audience is invoked as a mass network of anonymous and yet thoroughly privatised listeners. Focusing on the promotion and affordances of these various new radio- and radio-like applications for sharing speech online, this article seeks to interrogate what is at stake in these contradictions in terms of the ongoing politics, experience and ethics of listening in a mediated world.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Accepted version

Journal

Australian Journalism Review

ISSN

0810-2686

Publisher

Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia

Issue

2

Volume

36

Page range

77-90

Department affiliated with

  • Media and Film Publications

Notes

Special issue: Radio reinvented

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2015-03-19

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2015-03-19

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2015-03-19

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