Writing 2: Scales of Social Space

In “No Dead Air! The iPod and the Culture of Mobile Listening,” by Michael Bull, it’s said that the iPod allows urban society to reclaim control over their environment through the use of personalized soundscapes. By being able to make their own sound experiences, individuals are able to filter out the often overwhelming noise of the city and instead make their own narratives to help them navigate a city's space. The idea of being able to create personal agency within the premade landscape of a city is also shown in Tony Silver’s documentary Style Wars, which documents young graffiti artists and breakdancers in 1980s New York City and follows how they assert cultural ownership over public spaces by using art and performance.

Bull’s thoughts of the iPod as a tool for “sensory gating” can be used to also understand the graffiti artists' relationship with the city. iPod users go into a private auditory world to manage the urban life while the youth in Style Wars instead demonstrate themselves by spray painting on subway trains, walls, and street corners or by using dance as a way of expression. In both cases, individuals are not passively accepting the premade layout of the city but are instead rewriting its meaning to suit their own lives and identities. The graffiti acts as its own visual soundtrack by being able to be mobile signs of personal and collective identity. Alike to music users creating their own sense of control and presence within the city. Both practices challenge the alienation of traditional city design and authority by turning everyday infrastructures and the surrounding area into personal and cultural creativity.

By comparing these two resources, a deeper understanding of how individuals look for both escape and redefinition is seen. Whether through using music, spray paint, or dance, the intention of expressing a shared personal experience and asserting presence over an environment that often feels depersonalizing is celebrated. In cities that are typically designed for efficiency, surveillance, and control, these acts of self-expression act as rebellions towards the conventional. There’s something beautiful in the human desire to create a space of comfort within the uncomfortable and I think these resources perfectly display that. The feeling to personalize and to reclaim the cities that we live in can help to remind us that even if we are in environments that feel disconnected to us, we are able to find ways to assert our own presence, creativity, and right to belong.