Erik Davis’s “Acoustic Cyberspace” is one doozy of an article. And for, all it’s jargon and lofty concepts, it was an article I thoroughly enjoyed. This concept of sound as an amazing “place” is crazy interesting to me, which means I was willing to slow down, google words as I needed to, and try and straighten out exactly what it was Davis was trying to get across to the reader.

Firstly, I was taken aback by Davis’s dismissal of visual representation. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been taught to express myself through crayola crayons and word documents. But the longer I dwelt on this concept, the more the inadequacies of visual representational stood out to me. Anyhow, once I understood what Davis was getting at there and how profound that concept was, I was very willing to accept the arguments Davis made regarding acoustic cyberspace.

My “favorite” quote from the paper might be a little silly, but to me, it embodied a lot of what the tone and the structure of what the article was attempting to convey.

“What made early radio so exciting, in terms of
the technical, the social, and the imaginative, was its openness:
it was a space that wasn’t entirely defined, wasn’t totally
mapped.”

Essentially, I feel that once you clear out the mumbo jumbo, and get to the underlying point, the author is trying to tell you how exciting sound is. How neat it is that there is this space yet to be explored, that allows for almost unbounded self expression and exploration. And how savage it is that technology is a tool paving the way to an epic cyberspace of sound (even if that cyberspace has its own set of shortcomings). Davis is ecstatic about this new technology.. just like people were about early radio (which is why I chose this particular quote). The word choice within the paper was geared to a more educated audience than the residents of 121 B, and I feel that this quote is a boiled down version of what the paper was saying in technical terms.

Megan Nordstrom’s portfolio is stylistically the opposite of Davis’s article. Her portfolio is written in a dialect that us 121B n00bs can understand. Her writing also contains an obvious them, “Beware matey, there is no parlay on this island if you don’t fulfill the course outcomes!” Personally I found the over exaggerated use of a pirate theme to be more annoying than enjoyable, but it was none the less affective. Her word choice evoked obvious sounds and connotations, which would have been lost on the reader without the use of corny pirate metaphors. Additionally, Megan eased us into the world of acoustics nicely, taking comfortable baby steps, unlike Davis who chucked us bodily into a sea of sound.

I’m also enjoying the Marshall McLuhan recording.. “Writing was an embalmic process that froze us” is a pretty epic claim.