Author: Mack Hagood File Type: pdf For almost sixty years, media technologies have promised users the ability to create sonic safe spaces for themselvesfrom bedside white noise machines to Beats by Dres Hear What You Want ad campaign, in which Colin Kaepernicks headphones protect him from taunting crowds. In Hush, Mack Hagood draws evidence from noise-canceling headphones, tinnitus maskers, LPs that play ocean sounds, nature-sound mobile apps, and in-ear smart technologies to argue the true purpose of media is not information transmission, but rather the control of how we engage our environment. These devices, which Hagood calls orphic media, give users the freedom to remain unaffected in the changeable and distracting spaces of contemporary capitalism and reveal how racial, gendered, ableist, and class ideologies shape our desire to block unwanted sounds. In a noisy world of haters, trolls, and information overload, guarded listening can be a necessity for self-care, but Hagood argues our efforts to shield ourselves can also decrease our tolerance for sonic and social difference. Challenging our self-defeating attempts to be free of one another, he rethinks media theory, sound studies, and the very definition of media. **Review Mack Hagood retunes the field of sound studies, boosting the prominence of environmental and ambient soundsrain, heartbeats, the hum and whir of white noisethat can now be mobilized as electronic tools. Hagood offers a series of riveting case studies for what he calls orphic media, which fight sound with sound to sculpt personal space. The first book to foreground these astonishingly pervasive technologies of sonic self-control, Hush inserts sound into critical debates about affect, filter bubbles, and productivity apps. By the end of the book you wonder how sound could have previously been so overlooked in these arenas. (Mara Mills) Steering a path between ethnography and history,Hush considers the strange status of sounds to be heard but not listened to. Throughout, Mack Hagood wonders at the affective power of sound as a presence or absenceand as a tool for listenersas they negotiate their embedded existence in the world with the social demand to be autonomous, self-managing subjects. Hush is challenging and imaginative read it and you will learn to think differently about sound, noise, silence, and meaning. (Jonathan Sterne) A fascinating study of our efforts to control sound and, through it, our emotional and political lives. As Mack Hagood shows, the sonic and the social are never far apart and are best thought together. (Fred Turner) About the Author Mack Hagood is Robert H. and Nancy J. Blayney Assistant Professor of Comparative Media Studies at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

Author: Simon Kövesi File Type: pdf This book investigates what it is that makes John Clares poetic vision so unique, and asks how we use Clare for contemporary ends. It explores much of the criticism that has appeared in response to his life and work, and asks hard questions about the modes and motivations of critics and editors. Clare is increasingly regarded as having been an environmentalist long before the word appeared this book investigates whether this green rush to place him as a radical proto-ecologist does any disservice to his complex positions in relation to social class, work, agriculture, poverty and women. This book attempts to unlock Clares own theorisations and practices of what we might now call an ecological consciousness, and works out how his ecocentric mode might relate to that of other Romantic poets. Finally, this book asks how we might treat Clare as our contemporary while still being attentive to the peculiarities of his unique historical circumstances. **