What does Gitelman mean when she states, “it was to the sheets of tinfoil that the language of print culture adhered most freely” (165)? I don’t understand how print culture can resemble the sounds on the tinfoil. Does a sound resemble another sound that is similar to it on the tinfoil? Is the answer merely that each sound has a certain look just as they conformed the alphabetical letters to match each other in print culture? Maybe I missed something from both readings, but we had writing long before this. So, what does Gitelman mean by this statement—I can’t wrap my mind around it, unless she’s speaking figuratively? Also, the term “adhered most freely” sounds paradoxical.
Sterne does not make it clear to me what the difference is between hearing and listening—since I thought the difference was what he said it was not exactly, “hearing as passive and listening as active” (98).
Also, last night while I heard a man’s voice emitted from a television from the guy’s apartment upstairs, I wondered how I could tell that it was not a real person’s voice. It’s pretty obvious from the older instruments since there could be static or it just sounds old and extra creepy (like the Lord Tennyson on wax cylinders), but how do we tell with the current technologies? Perhaps I missed something from The Audible Past or haven’t gotten there yet. Does it have anything to do with using the human ear (cadavers—really interesting) as a model? The newer technology just isn’t perfect yet since our ears hear the difference between the two.
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Yes, it's a curious statement by Gitelman, since the tinfoil is, by most points of view, unreadable. Perhaps this is the point? By creating a souvenir or trace that is unreadable and yet certainly the result of a kind of writing, these foils were the predecessors of the cd-roms or ipods etc. of today; so, the idea of the language of print culture adhering to the foils is a way of exploring this transfer of print from a readable surface to an unreadable trace.
ReplyDeleteI think you're right that Sterne doesn't firmly distinguish hearing and listening. I think he's very concerned to frame these as relative to the culture that produces them. Yet, as the example from your apartment shows, there are phenomena about hearing that do feel natural and immediate, despite technology.