Snap, Crackle & Pop

On Listening, Memory & Amnesia

Abstract

 Broadcast media, recording and communiations technologies have developed at an alarming pace since Edison proposed the phonograph as an acoustic Ars Memoria. A series of rapid iterations have overlaid and overwritten previous systems and modus operandi making it easy to forget the central role that radio has played within Australian communities ~ both rural and urban. The broadcast medium functioned as a form of entertainment, a mechanism for nation building and as a vital link able to transcend the “tyranny of distance”, be it real or imagined. My inter- est is focussed, not so much upon a technological trajectory but primarily upon the role that listening plays in establishing memory, situated within a geophysical site, to form identity and place. The corollary of this interest also lies in its inverse – the realisation that individual memory, as well as cultural histories, is extremely fragile and fugitive, evaporating under the pressures of technological and social change driven by the massive acceleration and saturation of media information.