Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday LifeOn buses, trains, and streets over the past decade and more, youths in particular but increasingly older people as well tune into their personal stereos and tune out city sounds. Why? What does the personal stereo mean to these people and to urban culture more generally? Does it heighten reality? Enable people to cope? Isolate? Create a space? Combat boredom? Far too commonplace and enduring to be considered a fashion accessory, the personal stereo has become a potent artefact symbolizing contemporary urban life. This book opens up a new area of urban studies, the auditory experience of self and place. In doing so, it enhances our understanding of the role of media and technology in everyday life. Urban, cultural and anthropological studies have been dominated by explanations of experiences drawing upon notions of visuality. But culture always has an auditory component that shapes attitudes and behaviour -- perhaps nowhere more so than in the city where sound is intensified. This book challenges strictly visual approaches to culture by proposing an auditory understanding of behaviour through an ethnographic analysis of personal stereo use. The author reformulates our understanding of how people, through the senses, negotiate central experiences of the urban, such as space, place, time and the management of everyday experience, and examines the critical role technology plays. This book will be of interest to anyone seeking a fresh and incisive approach to urban studies, cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, or media and communication studies. |
Contents
An Introduction | 17 |
PersonalStereo Use and the Management | 29 |
Personal Stereos and the Management of Cognitive | 43 |
Copyright | |
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Other editions - View all
Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life Michael Bull No preview available - 2000 |
Common terms and phrases
activity Adorno aesthetic aestheticization analysis of personal-stereo appears auditory experience auditory looking aware becomes Benjamin cognitive communication technologies constitution construction contingency create Critical Theory culture industry daily demonstrate dialectical empirical enables environment epistemologies ethnography everyday experience example experienced experiential feel film filmic flânerie flâneur following user forms function gaze going habitual headphones hear heightened Honneth imaginary interpersonal interview number 13 journey Kracauer Lefebvre lifeworld listen to music London meaning merely mobile mood mundane narrative nature notions perceived personal stereo personal-stereo users phenomenology radio recreation relation relationship representational space Reservoir Dogs role Scott Walker Sennett sense significance Silverstone Simmel situations social song Sony Sony Walkman sound soundtrack strategies street structure tape technologically mediated television Theorists there's things thoughts transformed urban behaviour urban experience urban space user's Users describe Users often describe via technology visual walking Walkman Walter Benjamin we-ness whilst