When was the modern listener turned? Johathan Sterne in his book The Audible Past introduces an image of the Ear Phonoautograph developed by Alexander Graham Bell and Clarence Blake in 1874 as an emblem of the shift from voice automata to tympanic technologies. The ear phonoautograph used an actual ear attached to a stylus to trace sound – it illustrates the shift from technologies that tried to reproduce voice to technologies based on the ear, in this case literally.
Automata priviledged speech and the human voice; they took particular instances of sound production and attempted to re-create them. Tympanic machines treated hearing and sound as general problems and were oriented toward the human ear. (p. 71)
Sterne goes on to write about how audile technologies like the stethoscope and telegraph led to the development of the disciplined and professional listener (doctor and telegraph operator.)
In new media studies we often priviledge the screen and visualization in discussing the emergence of the interactive subject when it could be argued that the earphone and audition where where the technologies/techniques that heralded the modern mediated subject. In other words, the modern electronic consumer learned first to master audition.
What interests me is how the modern digital native doesn’t notice how they learned techniques of listening and seeing (not to mention interacting through keyboards and mice) in order to be home on the net. Visualization and sonnification seem intuitive because we think that listening, seeing and interacting are easy, but they are only easy to those for whom these techniques are transparent. They are transparent because we are habituated to the technologies. Like glasses on our nose, they dissappear so we can interact through them. That is the nature of media – the message is their particular way of dissappearing.