ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author discusses the absence of sound in contemporary accounts of media consumption and the social science disciplines’ consequent failure to understand the complexity of proximity, distance, and mobility in forms of media consumption. He then offers an alternative, “historically” informed analysis of sound experience by looking at three iconic moments of sound consumption in Western culture. The exclusion of the aural in media accounts of the experience of proximity and distance has led many media sociologists to neglect or misinterpret the historically situated meanings attached to these terms. Whereas notions of media-generated “distance” remain to be adequately explained, the meanings attached to “proximity” have recently been recognized, if not the specifically “sound” nature of that proximity. Odysseus’s success is dependent upon both the Sirens and his own guile, whereas Fitzcarraldo relies on the technology of the phonograph and the voice of Caruso.
