Audio, Archives, and the Affordance of Listening in a Pedagogy of “Difference” by Jean Bessette

  • “When digital scholars attend to the affordance of a mode or a medium, they tend to emphasize what kinds of composing its constraints help produce, such as the “particular affordances of sound” to “convey accent, emotion, music, [and] ambient sounds” (Takayoshi & Selfe, 2007, p. 9) or the “affordances of a digitally connected, networked environment” to “enable combinations of sounds, images, motions, and words” (Adsanatham, Garrett, & Matzke, 2013, p. 317). Different modes (such as words or sounds) and different mediums (such as television or the Internet)1 “afford” different rhetorical moves.”

Below is audio with ambient sounds at Lasalle, Gard, France. Here you can recognize the sound of wind, someone stepping on leaves as they explore the environment they’re currently in. 

 

  • Student resistance to feelings of “intrusion” has much to do with how they engage with the politically charged materials; how they “attribute identity or intention to a writer in order to understand or account for a text” ( Haas, 1993, p. 23); and how they map that reading onto their instructor, who may herself be marked by an identity of “difference.” This, too, is an attribute of affordance.

Below is an instrumental with that has some pop, electronic, and outerspace-like elements to it. I in a way gives off vibes of how the word intrusion is defined.

 

  • As Gibson explained, engagement is fundamentally guided by social relations of difference: “we pay closest attention to the optical and acoustic information that specifies what the other person is, invites, threatens, and does,” before acting accordingly (1979, p. 128). Paying attention to how students engage with sources before and during multimodal composing means shifting our understanding of affordance back to Gibson and back to difference.

I find this particularly interesting. It makes me think of how we can identify and label things by its sound. For example, if you’re just taking a walk in a downtown area, it is easy to here what a car sounds like without having to look and observe your surroundings. It’s easy to identify sounds of a construction site because we “know” what heavy machinery sound like. Or think about when we teach little kids what certain animals sound like (e.g. dogs, cows, birds).

 

  • This association was particularly likely when the instructor’s body marked her a biased advocate for a cultural issue or identity, as Kopelson (2003) has argued

hmmm. Outside of “body,” that brings me to think of how we identify people by what they wear. When you hear about a formal wedding, you think of the attire and the etiquette. Or how about when someone mentions that they work for a corporate office…we tend to vision suite and tie wear.

 

  • . These gay liberation radio shows are a fascinating archive of materials in the history of sexuality, but they are also deeply personal, overtly political, and can be discomforting for some students. Through the form of interviews, comedy, music, poetry, and monologues from hosts Alfred and Burke, the radio shows explored in depth the difficult terrain of AIDS, of mental anguish and social ostracism, of explicit homosexual intimacy, and of “hustling” (gay male prostitution). The shows were sometimes humorous and even frivolous, with segments of comedy, campy songs, and topics like pick-up lines in gay bars.

This brings me to think of a particular episode of “Gaycation.”…in this show it is a more serious matter opposed to a comedic skit described in the quote above.