Listening Online, Diverse Attentions, and Avantwhatever.org

Ben Byrne

 

The dominance of commercial social media over online space, time, and relations has made it increasingly difficult for creative individuals and organisations to develop and support their own communities. 'Online' is also becoming ever more indistinguishable from 'offline', with physical and digital realities enmeshed. This is what Jonathan Crary refers to as the 'internet complex', identifying that 'now, amid intensifying social and environmental breakdown, there is a growing realization that daily life overshadowed on every level by the internet complex has crossed a threshold of irreparability and toxicity' (Crary 2022, 1). Companies such as Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, Microsoft, and Tencent have become a huge presence, and some of the most financially successful businesses in the world under what Nick Srnicek has accurately described as 'platform capitalism' (Srnicek 2017). The social media software they run feel inescapable. Apps and platforms such as Bandcamp, Dǒuyīn/TikTok, Facebook, iMessage, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitch, WhatsApp, Wēixìn/WeChat, and YouTube are everyday life for many. What's more, the network effects of these techno-autocratic systems make it difficult to leave. These are the places where people are. Yet they are also places where people struggle to connect, to be heard through the algorithms and advertising of so called 'attention' economies. Inhabiting these spaces quietly is pejoratively called 'lurking'. What can be understood as listening without calling for attention or evaluating the contributions of others with 'likes', 'hearts', 'thumbs ups', and other emojis is framed either as passive, or as sinister and ill-willed, even dangerous. Listening, however, is exactly what is needed online.

Facing this dilemma both personally and with Avantwhatever, a forum for digital art, sound and design that I founded and direct, I have gradually worked on refusing the choices offered by these platforms. This has involved a critically slow process of extrication, deleting accounts, mostly one at a time, and experimenting with ways to use commercial platforms without accepting the logics and timelines they present. It has further involved developing alternatives, especially to support Avantwhatever's activities, public programs, and communities, and foster spaces for listening online, from the project's beginnings as a netlabel to the completely online Avantwhatever Festival in 2020 and beyond.

Key is Avantwhatever.org, a decentralised social media server offered by the organisation. Started in late 2020, it uses the open source software Hometown developed and maintained by Darius Kazemi. It is inspired by Kazemi's (2019) work, and in particular his guide 'Run your own social', as well as Jenny Odell's (2019) call to 'do nothing' as a creative response to attention economies, Kate Lacey's (2013) work on listening publics, and Kate Crawford's (2011) work on how online engagement can be driven by listening. Avantwhatever.org is an ongoing refusal of the logics of commercial social media that offers resistance to their dominance in the form of a creative project of ethical community building and support. It is an example of a space online that cultivates listening in an attempt to disrupt attention economies, which here I place alongside Patrick Hase and Anuraag Bhatia's independent streaming platform room2 and the Manus Recording Project Collective's where are you today, which listened in to the lives of refugees in various forms of detention imposed by the Australian state. All are projects that stage and support listening online in various forms.

Listening Online

Social media is driven by a contradiction. Users are promised the opportunity to connect, only to face a struggle both to be heard above the din of each other and the advertisers paying for their attention, and an inability to listen deliberately, struggling to be attentive, lost in the algorithmically selected infinite scroll. The details of the interfaces of commercial social media impose this contradictory reality. We are positioned both to seek attention, and be denied it, caught in an endless loop of emotional promise and disappointment. Waiting for a message to be 'read' or receive a reply when someone is 'typing', noticing you haven't received any more 'likes' on your post after getting one, and comparing your 'followers' or 'supporters' to someone with more. These all pair with struggling to keep up with a group chat, thumbing endlessly through 'stories', tumbling down a cascade of video recommendations, and missing posts you're interested in, and might respond to, because they're hidden beyond the eternal recurrence of the paid and the 'popular right now'. We're all set up to want attention, which we don't get and that we're denied the chance to provide. To top it all off it's attention that we might not all have craved so much if we hadn't been encouraged to develop an appetite for it, adults who realise the McDonalds we were sold as kids sucks, but keep buying it anyway.

The listening online that I'm describing here could often be framed as a metaphoric listening; listening as a practice of reading and watching, of attending to and 'paying attention' as much as directly and explicitly an engagement with sonic experiences, as a way of being online that has often been dismissed as 'lurking'. This listening is what Kate Crawford (2011) writes about in 'Listening, not Lurking: The Neglected Form of Participation'. Crawford (2011, 63) presents listening as a 'metaphoric counterpart' to voice and the valorisation of 'speaking up' and 'having your say'. She also reframes lurking positively as 'the most common state for Internet users', through which they offer a 'listening audience' (Crawford 2011, 63-64). Joanne McNeil similarly deliberately uses lurking 'only in a positive context', explaining that 'lurking is witnessing and listening on the internet, rather than opining and capturing the attention of others' (2020, 121). Kate Lacey extends this, emphasising the importance of listening in conceiving how public discourse functions, arguing that:

"To Listen" is both an intransitive and a transitive verb. In other words, it is possible to listen without necessarily listening to anything. Listening can therefore be understood as being in a state of anticipation, of listening out for something. The listening public in this sense is always a latent public, attentive but undetermined (Lacey 2013, 7).

Concern for public debate is generally understood to focus on who gets to speak and what they say, but Lacey reframes publics as listening publics, whose listening justifies and supports those who 'speak up'. This possibility is by no means limited to social media, in fact it not only pre-dates contemporary social media but is arguably challenged by the very features of commercial social media I have outlined here, in which algorithms and other design decisions interfere with peoples' ability to direct their own listening. As Cathy Lane points out, 'Technology can help us to LISTEN' and 'it can also help us not to LISTEN' (2017, 76). Frances Dyson , addressing the role of the media in contemporary crises, ecological and economic, the 'tone of our times', writes that 'the actual "sound" of media is ignored, as are the conditions of hearing it' (2014, 2). As public discourse increasingly takes place online in the form of short snippets, 'resonance—with it's attributes of sympathy, empathy, and common understanding—is reduced to echo: the shallow repetition of the loudest voice' (2014, 2). However, the online listening that Crawford writes about is not just reading by another name, not a metaphor, it is an active seeking out, an example of listening as a practice that extends beyond the perceptual process of engaging with sound. The sonic practices Dyson articulates and rightly valorises can and are being applied as people exert what Brandon LaBelle calls 'sonic agency', 'enabling new conceptualizations of the public sphere and expressions of emancipatory practices ... gaining momentum and guidance through listening and being heard' (2018, 4), online as well as offline, digitally as well as acoustically.

In his book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, Walter Ong distinguishes between oral and literary cultures and traditions, embodied in what he calls 'primary orality' and 'secondary orality' (2003, 11). Compared with primary orality as 'untouched by any knowledge of writing or print', Ong defines secondary orality as 'sustained by telephone, radio, television, and other electronic devices that depend for their existence and functioning on writing and print' (2003, 11). This includes much of the mediated public spheres Lacey addresses with her focus on radio and other broadcast media, given their use of scripts and prompters in presenting spoken forms. In turn the typically short text messages of social media posts, and accompanying use of emojis, memes, gifs, and other short clips, can be considered in these terms perhaps a secondary literary culture, or indeed tertiary and beyond forms of both oral and literary cultures intertwining. The reality of contemporary social media demonstrates how it is not so easy to separate written and spoken voices, nor indeed voices expressed in possibly ironic gifs. Listening is, therefore, a valuable practice, which can be applied beyond the acoustic. When the voices heard are written, this can be described as metaphoric listening but it is nonetheless perhaps more properly extra-sonic. It is not that listening stands in for reading and watching, so much as that listening as a practice is applied beyond hearing.

Listening online extends beyond the sonic, but as Emile Frankel points out experiences of the internet are increasingly noisy and full of background music too, from autoplaying videos to 'on demand' music streaming, and notifications whistling from your pocket for attention (2019, 35) . Frankel argues that 'when I'm online, when you're online, we are always listening' (2019, 17), but I don't find that to be the case. Listening online, as I frame it here, has a deliberateness that I think much internet culture does not attempt, much less manage. Even a platform like Bandcamp is questionable as a space for listening. Relied on by many involved in independent music cultures, though notably now owned by Songtradr after being bought and then sold by Epic Games, the site's interface arguably produces a distracted listening. Feeds, playback controls, and especially the almost ubiquitous playbar afford a listening as skim-reading, assessing for where attention is seen to be deserved rather than taking time to listen and discover. There are, however, numerous examples of projects that cultivate listening online as I am seeking to here, as an act of being present and open, of creating space for others and attending to what arises. For example, where are you today and room2, to name only two which cut across these different listenings I have been discussing.

Diverse Attentions

where are you today in archive form on the Manus Recording Project website

 

where are you today is an especially inspirational example of listening online. The project took place throughout August of 2020, and is now thoughtfully archived. Subscribers received a text message every day with a new 10 minute audio recording from Farhad Bandesh, Farhad Rahmati, Samad Abdul, Shamindan Kanapathi, Thanush Selvraj or Yasin Abdallah, recorded in detention in various places in Port Moresby, Naarm/Melbourne, and Meanjin/Brisbane. The recordings vary a great deal but are frequently quite ambient, affording listeners windows into the detainees' own listening. Notably too, the recordings are presented without commonly found playback controls, leaving listeners in the moment.

All the men listed above were previously forcibly detained on Manus Island as part of Australia's inhumane refugee policies, after attempting to reach the country by boat. Their collaborators in the Manus Recording Project Collective outside detention in Australia were Michael Green, André Dao, and Jon Tjhia, and the group worked with designers Paul Mylecharane and Matt Lenz from design practice Public Office. Green, Dao and Tjhia previously worked on the podcast The Messenger, reporting on the mistreatment of those detained on Manus in collaboration with Abdul Aziz Muhamat, at the time detained on the island and now settled in Geneva. Public Office then became involved for an installation work the collective produced in 2018, how are you today, which similarly featured recordings made by men in detention, though involving different detainee membership in the collective. Australian sonic arts organisation Liquid Architecture supported and presented both how are you today and where are you today.

Listening to where are you today daily in 2020 from a long lockdown in my home in Naarm/Melbourne was a vital source of connection, context, and hope at a difficult time. It gave me a way to listen to those most awfully subject to Australia's authoritarian and unyielding border policing, which placed in context the comfort and safety of my own situation, and offered hope for our ability to be present for one another. The project demonstrates what Marshall McLuhan terms the 'aural tactility' (2005, 72) of digital and communications technology, weaving together the use of mobile audio recording, text messages, and web apps to both enable listening and archive that listening. There has already been significant scholarly engagement with the work of the collective, such as a number of articles in a special issue of the Law Text Culture journal, themed 'Acoustics of Justice: Law, Listening, Sound.' Of particular relevance here is André Dao and Andrew Brooks's writing on the group's work. Dao, a member of the collective, reflects on his experience hearing and re-hearing, as he puts it, the recordings for how are you today while working on the exhibit and afterwards, connecting hearing in an auditory sense with the legal hearing as 'event', and the 'right to be heard' (2020, 61-62). Brooks similarly asserts that the recordings from where are you today pierce the racist white sonic field of Australia as 'a reclamation of the right to representation' for the refugees involved that implicates listeners as witnesses (2020, 111-113) . Visiting manusrecordingproject.com it is possible to listen to the recordings, as well as the listening of others via details of how many times each message was sent, how many times it was listened to and where from, along with how far you are listening from. The listenings where are you today facilitates are specific and deliberate, the messages, recordings, and website establishing and tracing lines of connection and implication.

 

Example of the room2 interface

 

Patrick Hase and Anuraag Bhatia's room2 is also something I first experienced through COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns. Developed and curated by the two to facilitate listening to and gathering around ambient electronic music while people were under stay at home orders, it is as an audiovisual presentation platform that facilitates active listening through user/audience participation, to the extent that only a landing page is shown between programs. Initially presented in an asynchronous form with a season of audio works streamable on demand for specifically timed periods with prompts that users could reply to with either drawings or written responses, the project then ran a season of synchronous live events, all throughout 2021. These then led to an iteration of the project for the BLEED Festival in 2022, which combined both along with a physical component in the form of a venue at Arts House in Naarm/Melbourne that audiences could attend for the live event. Asynchronous strands of room2 feature minimal interfaces, with playback controls and text, and Microsoft Paint style drawing facility as needed. Synchronous, live presentations are similarly gently designed, adding a 'screen' pane that may feature live streaming or live coded visuals alongside the audio stream, and a chat window. All iterations of room2 have continued the initial use of prompts, and affordances for users to produce and upload written and drawn contributions, which are composited into the site once users make a contribution. In contrast to almost all of the streaming and other online events that popped up as creative communities lived through the first years of the pandemic, room2 manages to create an active listening space that respects and empowers users, fostering diverse attentions.

These projects both demonstrate the kind of 'radical refusal' that I, like Crary (2022, 3) and many, see as necessary, and do so in ways that are notable for their facilitation of creative connections in which the active participation of various listenings is recognised. This refusal is of the 'internet complex' as presented to us by the corporations that dominate the internet and financial markets, and specifically of a position as atomised and targeted, alienated from others and the places we inhabit. Importantly, I am not as dismissive of the internet as Crary (2022, 10-11), seemingly far from it. He argues that there has never and will never be a 'digital commons' and treats the internet and 'internet complex' as synonymous, while I see much potential in the internet, especially embedded in the real and physical world, despite the pressuring dominance of the internet complex of commercial platforms. where are you today and room2 both allow us to experience digital commons embedded in the physical world, as projects and platforms they facilitate creative practices of gathering that foreground listening as a way of connecting.

Jenny Odell's (2019) book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy has been key in helping me connect my distaste for the reality presented by commercial social media with Avantwhatever's activities, approach, and role. Odell (2019) deftly reveals how creative practice can help to resist, and perhaps reverse, the impact of commercial social media platforms on human and more-than-human lives. Describing how a performance of a piece of experimental music by John Cage remapped her attention to sound beyond 'melodic music', she argues for 'how art can teach us new scales and tones of attention' (Odell 2019, 21&127). She exhibits both cynicism around the possibility of digital commons apparently similar to Crary's, and a reluctance to endorse refusing platforms such as Facebook entirely, as well as what appears at times a preference for offline experiences, all of which I question (Odell 2019, 90-91&171). However, she articulates particularly clearly the reliance of attention economies on fear and anxiety (Odell 2019, xx). This leads Odell to call for a specific kind of 'doing nothing', finding:

I think that "doing nothing"—in the sense of refusing productivity and stopping to listen—entails an active process of listening that seeks out the effects of racial, environmental, and economic injustice and brings about real change (Odell 2019, 22).

Here Odell (2019, 90-91) advocates for something similar to the 'listening out' Lacey writes about, as an active listening like that afforded by where are you today and room2, which refuses the logics of the internet complex in the way Crary, Odell and I see as necessary. Odell links the attention assumed to be given over to commercial social media in attention economies with contemporary work practices emphasising productivity, as is shown in the quote above. This attention is one in which commercial social media users are presumed to be so absorbed in their 'feeds' that billions of dollars has been made from selling the programmatic insertion of advertising into that space of attention, based on demographic data sets dividing them by age, location, interests, and countless other categories. I question whether users really are attentive according to the definition that underpins these economies, but that doesn't mean of course that the ads don't work, or the platforms aren't profitable.

This absorbed, profitable, attention is one that Crary critiques, and places in historical context in his book Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (1999). He charts the modern definition of attentiveness, distraction as a 'problem', and the complex relationship between the attention demanded of workers and that valorised in the arts (Crary 1999). 'Modern distraction can only be understood through its reciprocal relation to the rise of attentive norms and practices', he argues (Crary 1999, 23). Social media users are perhaps then attentive to the algorithmic offerings of the platforms they inhabit in a way that has been developed through industrial capitalism, or are in a state of distracted semi-attention to these platforms in a way equally linked to capitalist economies and hegemonies, or both, or neither. Simultaneously they are perhaps distracted from the people and places they care about through the attention they pay to these platforms, or due to an inability to pay attention to anyone or anything, living with a deficit of attention, or perhaps both, or neither. Quite possibly all of these at different times and to different extents. The point, however, I find, is not to diagnose which of these is accurate but to see that this commodification of attention, and distraction, prevents agency in how we attend to the world, leaving us without the time and space to listen out.

Simone Weil's (2021, 65) work on attention is instructive here. She argues that 'most often attention is confused with a kind of muscular effort', and advocates instead for practices of attention grounded in waiting. It must be recognised that Weil considered attention to God above all other forms of attention, but her ideas are valuable to secular approaches to attention too, especially considering her focus on attention as key in all formal learning. For Weil 'attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty and ready', watching and listening (2021, 67). This kind of attention is exactly what is not afforded by commercial social media, but which is fostered by where are you today, room2, 'doing nothing' and 'listening out'.

Avantwhatever.org

Avantwhatever has always involved a focus on working online, starting as a label publishing releases available freely on the internet as well as in physical editions. Gradually, however, it has come to focus more and more on the possibilities of listening online, when listeners may be online almost everywhere, and online space is recognised as real, material, and embedded in the physical world. This shift was already in motion but was nonetheless accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, with the third edition of the biennial Avantwhatever Festival moving entirely online in 2020. I worked with Mylecharane from Public Office on a bespoke website for the festival, and built a dedicated streaming server and Jitsi teleconferencing setup, which together supported a program of audiovisual streams, talks, workshops, and browser-based installations, along with a 'festival club', and other social spaces. The festival centred on creating situations for listening online, in my curation of the program, as well as the design and use of the festival website. This attention to listening continued in the works presented, an attentive listening that approaches attention in a manner similar to Weil, attempting to attend to what is before you, to be present in a way that demands constant reappraisal, listening to listening. For example with B Fary's Local Time, which uses field recordings and JavaScript coding to present a 'realtime' listening to their local area of Footscray, along the Maribyrnong river and centred on Bunurong/Boon Wurrung country in Naarm/Melbourne. Since the festival, Mylecharane and I have re-designed and launched Avantwhatever.com, where the browser-based works are now available as 'subdomains'. The site is conceived as a venue and archive, a domain for experimentation, collaboration and creativity, and is accompanied by Avantwhatever.org.

Around Avantwhatever Festival 2020 I gradually deleted my personal accounts on commercial social media. I had become more and more concerned about the impacts of these platforms, as I have outlined here, but had also found that the way I limited my use of them meant I got less and less from them, even in promoting Avantwhatever's activities. I deleted my WhatsApp account in early 2020, and following the festival deactivated and then eventually deleted my personal Facebook account, and thus Avantwhatever's presence on the platform given Meta requires a personal Facebook account to operate other identities such as pages and groups. At the same time, in the second half of 2020, I ran an online studio, 'Disrupting Social Media', with undergraduates at RMIT University, from home while living through Naarm/Melbourne's longest lockdown of the pandemic. All of this led to me setting up Avantwhatever.org using Darius Kazemi's 'fediverse' (fedi) software Hometown, an experiment in creating a social media space more conducive to listening.

Hometown is similar to Mastodon, which has received considerable attention as a Twitter alternative, especially following Elon Musk's purchase of that platform in late 2022. Hometown is what is called a fork of Mastodon, that is, software built from the code of Mastodon but with different features. Both can be described as free and open source software (FOSS), encouraging free use and reuse. Each looks similar to Twitter but they work very differently, technically and socially. Hometown and Mastodon are both part of the fedi, along with other platforms such as Pixelfed, PeerTube, Owncast, and many more. These software use a web standard called 'ActivityPub' to federate with each other, sharing posts between servers. Imagine using Twitter but being able to host your account yourself, or have a friend host it for you, but still be able to follow, be followed by, and message with anyone on the platform, AND be able to interact with Instagram, TikTok, WeChat, and other accounts. This is what the fedi achieves, and it works in any standard, contemporary web browser. Extending this decentralised structure, Hometown in particular offers the ability to post only to the server, or instance, you use, offering functionality closer to an internet forum along with that of a social media platform.

 

Avantwhatever.org's interface as I use it in a web browser, with separate columns for different feeds, known as 'timelines'.

 

I set up the Avantwhatever.org server, and my own account @benbyrne and invited some friends, colleagues, and collaborators. A number joined but only a few interacted, and fewer still stayed. Just as I have recounted, and found myself, it is not easy to apprehend what the fedi offers at first, especially as a key weakness is discoverability, and it is not designed to offer users the greatest reach possible. There isn't a reliable search option to find other users. However, I have come to realise that this is in some ways also a strength. Networks on the fedi are gradually built out of real connections, be they existing relationships, introductions, or shared interests, and so start with listening. For our server, this began with my networks and invitations, existing and built through listening out on the fedi. I then encouraged users to invite others if they liked, and to get involved in the running of the server. We worked up server rules and terms of service, including that the platform is experimental and I might accidentally destroy it. There are now about a dozen of us regularly active on .org, as we call it, and recently users have joined from around the world, including people who previously didn't know any of the existing members, but found us as an instance relevant to their ethos and interests, via the fedi. In the .org interface, when I log in I see a 'Home' timeline populated by posts from users I follow, and a 'Local' timeline with only posts made on .org, and can also access a 'Federated' timeline populated from the entire fedi, all of which operate chronologically, affording the chance to shift my horizon of listening deliberately.

The option for users to post only to their local timeline was key to my choice to set up .org as a Hometown server, as was the fedi's use of standards to facilitate both decentralisation and interoperability, producing robust local communities and global networks, where power is shared, and users are in control of their data and free to delete it or take it elsewhere. I was also inspired, and guided, by Kazemi's thinking and experience around running social networks. His guide, 'Run your own social' is an excellent starting point for those interested in changing how they do social media, and especially those in a position to help others do the same (Kazemi 2019). Along with writing and maintaining Hometown, and giving presentations and otherwise building decentralised social media, Kazemi (2019) runs his own server Friend Camp, 'for about 50 of his friends' as he puts it. He emphasises trust and keeping things small, and this is key as it enables users to attend to one another, to listen. Avantwhatever.org is similarly built on my relationships, on people's trust in me, and further layers of trust between and beyond members of communities it connects, trust that is gradually built through listening to each other.

The federated timeline on .org is only gradually populated with posts from servers .org users have interacted with, which may be as simple as someone following someone. At one point I discovered that 'relays', servers that act as hubs connecting multiple servers, are available to help smaller servers like ours discover the posts coming from other servers, and populate our federated timeline. This is designed to in turn help users discover others on other instances, to listen out. The idea appealed to me at first but I was surprised that when I put it to others on .org there was a clear preference to avoid the relays. The community appreciates that it is a quiet space that is gradually being built out of real relationships formed from people listening to and connecting with each other, and I think they were right. Some of the users on .org post globally, so their posts reach the timelines of other servers, and have built connections with users all over the world, some only use the local timeline, some only direct message, and some almost exclusively lurk, that is 'do nothing' except 'listen out'. We explicitly mention in our server rules that lurking is encouraged. A busy day on .org is about three local posts, and many of them are music recommendations.

Listening online is critical. As Crawford points out, lurking, that is listening, is an everyday activity for internet users, but this is not merely a metaphor (2011, 63-64). Listening as a practice extends beyond the sonic, offering a framework for attentively and patiently engaging with one another and the world. It is the logics and interfaces of commercial social media that interfere with listening online, and must be disrupted. Community run social media, streaming platforms, and collaborative artworks can all create spaces that foster listening, as do .org, room2 and where are you today. Taking the time to do nothing in the sense Odell prompts, which is actually to engage actively, to listen out in Lacey's words, is a key manoeuvre of creative resistance and ethical community building for our times, but is only possible with networks of support. Listening online is enabled by designing, facilitating, and living a web that affords us all that opportunity. This can involve eschewing normative playback controls and providing playful interfaces, centering and sharing the experiences of those who are marginalised and persecuted, ensuring open and interoperable architectures, and enabling local communities, amongst many other possibilities. Listening to and trusting one another, it is possible to replace the toxicity of the internet with networks that can connect us and the places we inhabit.

Works Cited

Brooks, Andrew. 2020. "Listening beyond the Border: Self-Representation, Witnessing, and the White Sonic Field." Law Text Culture 24 (1): 96–116.

Crary, Jonathan. 1999. Suspensions of Perception Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. October Books. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Crary, Jonathan. 2022. Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age in a Post-Capitalist World. London: Verso.

Crawford, Kate. 2011. "Listening, Not Lurking: The Neglected Form of Participation." In Cultures of Participation, edited by Hajo Greif, Larissa Hjorth, and Amparo Lasén, 63–77. Berlin: Peter Lang.

Dao, André. 2020. "What I Heard About Manus Island (When I Listened to 14 Hours of Recordings from Manus Island)." Law Text Culture 24 (1): 60–78.

Dyson, Frances. 2014. The Tone of Our Times: Sound, Sense, Economy, and Ecology. Leonardo. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Frankel, Emile. 2019. Hearing the Cloud. Hampshire, UK: Zero.

LaBelle, Brandon. 2018. Sonic Agency: Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance. Goldsmiths Press Sonic Series. London: Goldsmiths Press.

Lacey, Kate. 2013. Listening Publics: The Politics and Experience of Listening in the Media Age. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Lane, Cathy. 2017. "A Manifesto for New Listening' (or '20 Thoughts about Listening')." EURASIP Journal on Audio Speech and Music Processing, October.

Kazemi, Darius. 2019. "Run Your Own Social". 2019.

McLuhan, Marshall. 2005. "Visual and Acoustic Space." In Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. New York, N.Y.: Continuum.

McNeil, Joanne. 2020. Lurking: How a Person Became A User. New York, N.Y.: MCD.

Odell, Jenny. 2019. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House.

Ong, Walter J. 2003. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London, UK: Routledge.

Srnicek, Nick. 2017. Platform Capitalism. Theory Redux. Cambridge: Polity.

Weil, Simone. 2021. Waiting for God. Routledge Classics Ser. Milton: Taylor and Francis Group.