RESONANCE, REVERBERATION, AND RHYTHMS: CONCEPTUALIZING VIBRATORY POWER IN DIGITAL MEDIA

Abstract

This panel explores the theories, concepts, and methodologies appropriate to the exploration of the “vibratory power” of transduction where sound and other digitally mediated forms of reverberation conjure affective and corporeal bonds of resonance and solidarity. The first three papers engage in a critical interrogation of sound as epistemology and ontologies in digital networked media, with a focus on streaming internet radio. More specifically, these papers examine diverse uses and experiences of streaming ‘radio’ and its deployments for community-building, emotional sustenance, and an online reconstitution of place. In their explorations, these papers consider which methodologies are appropriate and useful to examine the affordances of streaming radio, enabling in turn analysis of informing ideas of ‘community’, intimacy, territorialization/deterritorialization, and questions of what comprises ‘radioness’ itself. Is radio still radio if it is online? What happens to the "community" that is conjured into being by terrestrial broadcast radio when the "station" is internet only?’ What does thinking from place mean when the tangibility of place is physically transcended and thus broken up and reconstituted as elements of locality, of community? The fourth and final power transposes the “perspective of frequency, force and affective tone” in transduction to the wider field of social media practices during the early stages of COVID. In this paper, the obsessive-compulsive ritual of “doomscrolling” becomes the practice through which rhythms of resonance and reverberation become imprinted upon the flows of everyday life through the transductive modulations of digital networked media.