Event/s
Electronic eavesdropping is as old as electronic communication. U.S. Civil War generals traveled with professional telegraph tappers in the 1860s. American phone companies tacitly sanctioned law enforcement wiretaps as early as 1895. And corporate communications giants abetted government eavesdropping programs for most of the twentieth century. Today, pundits and policymakers argue contentiously over the ethics of mass surveillance and global data collection. But the social and technological backstory to the rise of electronic eavesdropping in America remains largely unexamined. How did earlier generations of citizens understand and confront the problem of communications privacy? How did we get to where we are today?
In ‘The Uninvited Ear: A History of Wiretapping in the United States,’ scholar Brian Hochman is the first to try to answer these questions. Combining primary research in government archives with readings of court cases, wire thrillers, and Hollywood films, he uncovers the history of electronic eavesdropping in America from the nineteenth century to the present, arguing that cultural contests over wiretapping constitute contests over what it means to communicate in a networked society—a society in which information needs to travel across vast distances, and a society in which technologies of all sorts enable electronic data to traverse them.
Brian Hochman is an American academic and an Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University (USA) and the author of Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) and The Uninvited Ear: A History of Wiretapping in the United States (Harvard University Press)
Tue, 24. Jul–
Sun, 28. Oct
2018
EAVESDROPPING used to be a crime. According to William Blackstone, in his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1769): ‘eavesdroppers, or such as listen under walls or windows, or the eaves of a house, to hearken after discourse, and thereupon to frame slanderous and mischievous tales, are a common nuisance and presentable at the court-leet.’ Two hundred and fifty years later, eavesdropping isn’t just legal, it’s ubiquitous. What was once a minor public order offence has become one of the most important politico-legal problems of our time, as the Snowden revelations made abundantly clear. Eavesdropping: the ever-increasing access to, capture and control of our sonic worlds by state and corporate interests.
But eavesdropping isn’t just about big data, surveillance and security. We all overhear. Listening itself is excessive. We cannot help but hear too much, more than we mean to. Eavesdropping, in this sense, is the condition – or the risk – of sociality per se, so that the question is not whether to eavesdrop, but the ethics and politics of doing so. This project pursues an expanded definition of eavesdropping therefore, one that includes contemporary mechanisms for listening-in but also activist practices of listening back, that is concerned with malicious listenings but also the responsibilities of the earwitness.
This project directs our attention towards specific technologies (audio-tape, radio-telescope, networked intelligence) and politics (surveillance, settler colonialism, detention). Some contributions address the personal and intimate, others are more distant or forensic. Their scale ranges from the microscopic to the cosmic, from the split-second to the interminable. What all the artists and thinkers involved have in common, however, is a concern not just for sound or listening, but what it might mean for someone or something to be listened-to.
Movement 1: Overhear (July 24–August 5)
wiretapping, the sonic episteme, sonic agency,
excessive listening, forensic listening
Movement 2: Silicon ear (Aug 9–11)
big data, automation, algorithmic listening,
panacousticism
Movement 3: Earwitness (August 20–31)
the sonic colour line, sonic warfare, listening to history, the hearing, justice as improvisation
Movement 4: Listen Back (Oct 19-28)
Movement 1: Overhear
Movement 2: Silicon ear
Movement 3: Earwitness
Movement 4: Listen Back