D'Écriture - Sal Christ

Technology Killed the Engaged Listening Star

Okay… I am playing off a certain song by The Buggles. Seriously, however, technology  has most certainly made us the most passive information consumers—we don’t even necessarily have to be awake to receive it by our “I-can-do-everything” tracks-everything, super-mega, hyper-cool communication devices. We’re tuned in, turned on, and connected twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. Technology and its ability to grant access have allowed everything in our lives to become overwhelming oversaturated. We reblog. We retweet. We re-post.

We hear the songs played over and over again on Last.fm, run to Hype Machine to download the “sample tracks” to our heart’s content, and then fail to buy the album and really suss out the details of the lyrics.

We follow dozen of people on Tumblr—most of whom simply recycle the same old posts over and over—but do we ever take the time to read the sometimes exceptionally long or beautifully original posts from Roger Ebert? Or the random blogger we found by accident?

Twitter has conditioned us to hang on the value of the anecdote and the link. Do the majority of us actually click through to read the full story or have we defaulted to Tim Ferriss’s “low information diet” tactic of subsisting on the headlines alone?

If we’re working towards consuming more “quality” in less time, is the consumption itself even worth it? Are we ever truly listening—whether it be to a song, a story, or a moment expressed as an image?

You listen to the words being said, but do you hear what is being said?