Listening in the Afterlife of Data

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

If you walk into David Cecchetto‘s classroom, you might find people wearing audio devices that simulate hearing with a thousand-foot wide head. Or gadgets that swap their ears so that the left ear hears what the right should and vice versa. David is a media theorist who draws on his background as an artist/musician, to create what he calls “engagements,” strange sonic experiments that help him—and his students—understand the nature of our computer-driven lives.

In this episode, we feature an extended chat with David about his recent book, Listening in the Afterlife of Data (Duke University Press). It’s a book about the eternal impossibility of communication and the texture of that impossibility in our current computer-mediated age. David says we live in the afterlife of data, by which he means we know that our data-driven representations of the world don’t really capture the reality of our inner or outer lives, and we know that algorithms perpetuate injustices of all sorts—and yet, we still live our lives as if we do believe in the data. And this is where his engagements come in, the sonic experiments that confront the distortions and fallacies and textures of a data-driven life.

David Cecchetto is Professor of Critical Digital Theory in the Department of Humanities at York University in Toronto, Director of the Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought, he’s President of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. He wrote the book Humanesis: Sound and Technological Posthumanism (2013) and he’s co-authored and edited several others.

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