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When everyone can make themselves heard, who cares to listen? How can we learn to pay attention without simply waiting for our turn to speak? What does it truly mean to be a good listener?
Miriam Rasch offers a philosophical and personal exploration of the ethics of listening, understanding it not as a passive act but as a relationship between the self and the world. This relationship is always mediated—by technologies such as algorithms and social media, by techniques like dialogue and attention, and by our bodies and surroundings.
Rasch investigates listening in different settings across four chapters. The first explores the effects of technology, the second examines dialogue and its pitfalls, the third considers questions of testimony and bearing witness to trauma and violence, and the fourth shifts focus to nonverbal sounds such as music and nature as a way to discover meaning.
Listening brings together philosophy of technology, ethics, and aesthetics with examples from film, literature, and art as well as reflections on listening as an everyday practice. This book recasts listening as an act of generosity—an active and open-ended process that unites giving and receiving.
— Geert Lovink, media theorist and internet critic
In this age of cacophony and carnival barkers, philosopher Miriam Rasch's Listening offers a survey across the radio dial—an exploration of listening in all its resonant social, technological, political, aesthetic, and ethical forms. With proper critical attunement, listening—whether to birds, bots, or bassoons—can be a generous and grounding act.
— Shannon Mattern, author of Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media
Prologue: Infinite Conversations
1. The Context of Technology
2. The Wish for Dialogue
3. The Tradition of Testimony
4. Listening Practice
Epilogue: The Ethics of Listening
Acknowledgments
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index