“Radio is one sided when it should be two. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him. On this principle the radio should step out of the supply business and organise its listeners as suppliers.”
Bertolt Brecht
What happens when the voices fed into your head channelled through the wires from your portable memory-retrieval machine talk over our inner voice or transmit in a different tone? If the vocalist unexpectedly addresses you directly, could his or her voice in your head be experienced as an interruption to your real-time thinking? Could this alien voice speaking inside our head be perceived as inserting a thought? If this dismembered voice taking up residence in your head, talking in place of your inner voice, begins to induce traces of schizophrenic activity does it tip the balance in our minds to an alternate reality trip, temporarily dislocating us from the here and now? A hypnotic oscillation between background and foreground, the here and the there. Are we tripping towards a disruptured sense of human self-experience and an alienated self-consciousness?
Could we short-circuit the iTalk and iTrip? Could the white ear-budded listeners be organised into suppliers? Thousands of personally-curated sonic-plateaus self-talking across the dead space, random wireless agents ambulating the aether simultaneously transmitting and receiving dislocated field-recordings. The iTripper becomes an audio-blogger, a digital Harry Smith, travelling, listening, collecting, archiving, the journey constantly sountracked by the electrostatic omnipresent ohm-hum of the digital universe.
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