Radio Chthulucene 87.9 FM

Some quotes I scribbled down when listening to Marco Weirman today: 

“ as suggestion of scene, not imposition [like film/tv]” 

“firehose of stuff” 

“writing as if nobody will hear it again” 

 a “DJ” of people’s voices 

Afterwards, I was wondering if Weirman, as a writer seemingly self-aware of the mechanics of his particular medium, writes with the knowledge that the listener will most likely be doing something else while listening to his segment. Cleaning, driving, walking or running, cooking, other kinds of work. I hesitate to say “passive” listening because when I listen to podcasts, I often find that my actions become secondary to my listening, which doesn’t seem that passive. And anyway, I’m usually being some sort of “active”—if not listening, the aforementioned motions. 

But I do find that I am less accustomed to pure audio, to audio disconnected from image. People, especially now, are probably very pre-conditioned to image with phones, laptops, and stuff. But even then, most people have often relied on vision to navigate the world. It’s a given in the language: “I see” or “I see it as” instead of “I understand.” Even while listening to the clips in class, I wished that the transcript was up simultaneously, so I could look at the words being said. I wonder if he accounts for the fact that a listener may tune in mid-segment or may be distracted by other sounds or actions. 

Given the somewhat inaccessible nature of our final project—only those looking for the audios will find them—I’m not overly concerned about these questions. Still, I think it’s interesting to imagine what someone might think (literally) walking into a story or poem. Though, maybe someone walking with a receiver tuned to our particular channel—they would come to expect that. If the radios were set up close enough together, the walking would be like switching channels, like I guess an internal tuning but not tuning since the radio is tuned to the same station. Even if the radios were placed apart, it would still be similar, but just with long intervals of silence. 

The audience of our project will be doing something else—walking or maybe talking to another person—even if their focus is on searching for our stations. 

Maybe I should have written about walking.

I get a little irked by discussion of attention spans and how they’re decreasing because it reminds me a lot of rhetoric about how children are getting dumber with each generation or they can’t write anymore or whatever. I do find myself thinking in fragment; I find myself losing fragments before they’re finished; I find myself listening, writing, reading, walking—sometimes all at once with the technology of headphones, shoes, notes apps, and legs. I don’t think it’s our attention spans. Not really. Or maybe a little. But more our environment. I mean, even as I type this, I am in a lecture about archaeological methods and cultural resource management. I’m not even really watching, just listening. I’ve relegated it to podcast. Or maybe my occasional looking up is kind of like tuning—tuning in and out. Maybe that’s a little my fault, but also I feel constantly pulled in multiple directions and I have to layer attentions over one another to even get close to completing them.