The Auditory Dimension of the Technologically Mediated Self

: In this article, I aim to clarify some of the ways in which the auditory dimension of the self is constituted through the mediation of technology. I show that by excluding our immediate surroundings with mobile personalized and private auditory technologies, we are increasingly laying down a personal, inner spatial grid of acoustic memories that get integrated into our narrative identity and co-constitutes the space of familiarity and belonging that gives us a sense of who we are. To do so, I ﬁ rst lay out a clear ontological ground. Next, I outline how the auditory dimension of the self is constituted and subsequently mediated technologically. Finally, I bring to bear Erving Go ﬀ man ’ s theatrical framework of performative self-constitution as a useful framework to illustrate how, on one hand, the culturally available repertoire on which the imagination draws to constitute the self has augmented thanks to the contributions of other people in distal spatiotemporal contexts; on the other, the recon ﬁ guration of how we listen to the world and the other people in it entails muting or blocking out of other voices. This can stunt how we conceive of ourselves, producing an epistemic bubble involving a tunnel “ vision ” or echo-chamber e ﬀ ect. In addition, due to the coupling of bodily and cognitive structures with mobile, privatized auditory technologies that thereby become transparent in experience, others, by listening in on us, acquire the ability to privilege certain types of behavior while suppressing others. Thus, there is a danger that the individual autonomous agency so important to self-constitution can be compromised.


Introduction
The site of experience where the self is constituted is constantly being reconfigured in a seamless web comprising the self, other people, and technologies.When such technologies are coupled with bodily and cognitive structures of experience and thereby become phenomenologically transparent, 1 their impact calls for examination and clarification so the self is not constituted in ways that are undesirable.One way this might happen is by limiting the types of experiences we can have and the relationships we can have with other people, thereby limiting who we can be.In this article, I would like to examine and clarify the ways in which the auditory dimension of the self in particular is constituted through the mediation of technology so we may be better equipped to understand and deal with such undesirable forms of self-constitution.
Many authors have written about issues relevant to the auditory self and the tech-mediated auditory self in particular.Michael Bull, 2 for example, has written about the privatization of experience through personal listening devices into a sort of sanctuary in which the self may be forged and Heike Weber 3 and Karin Bijsterveld et al. 4 have written about "acoustic cocooning," or drivers' ability to create privatized, intimate auditory spaces inside automobiles, thereby harnessing them as a "technology of the self for mood control." 5 Others have written about how auditory technologies embody social structure, 6 which in turn influence selfconstitution.Moreover, there have been many applications of Goffman's framework of performative selfconstitution to particular technological contexts. 7 would like to contribute to this discussion by filling in the phenomenological gaps in existing accounts of the auditory self.Specifically, I would like to flesh out the embodied phenomenological entailments of the privatization of auditory experience through mobile technologies and the concomitant reconfiguration of contexts of listening.I will then show some of the ways in which the social constitution of the self may be affected.
To do this, I will avail myself of phenomenological conceptual tools and Erving Goffman's theatrical framework of performative self-constitution to develop a framework that highlights the possibility of both integration and incoherence as regards the self in order to consider how the technologically mediated constitution of the auditory self fits into that picture.This framework will then shed light on certain dangers: • The muting of the other with the knock-on effect on self-constitution that entails • Surreptitious, heterogeneously scripted forms of self-constitution that are laden with intentions by outsiders such as the Big Five tech companies in the United Stateswith access to and control of the technologies that provide a point of entry into the process of self creation and therefore mediate the constitution of the self.

Selfhood: Setting the Conceptual Stage
Let us note, to begin, that although at the heart of the human experience there may indeed be a phenomenological core self of the type described by Dan Zahavi 8i.e., as characterized by the self-givenness of experiencewe are quite a bit more than such phenomenological core selves.Clarifying the ontological features of the site where the human self is constituted will lay bare the fundamental dimensions defining the space in which a self that is more than simply a phenomenological core self is constituted.We turn to this task in the following section.
2.1 Embodied Ontological Ambiguity: Where Tech Takes Root Many philosophers have described the dimension of the ontological ambiguity at the heart of human existence.Jean-Paul Sartre, for instance, writes of "the double property of the human being, who is at once a Merleau-Ponty writes that the basic structures, the immanent topography of the experiential world, are laid down by means of one's body, revealing features of the world that in turn reflect the "repository stocked with natural powers" which is one's body. 11This is possible because the body is continuous with the world, part of the flesh of the world, not a "hole in being," but a "fold" 12 where being touches itself.One expression of this continuity is that the body is both perceived and perceiver, and this ambiguity -Merleau-Ponty calls it "reversibility"structures all experience.Ricoeur, in turn, notes that our lived embodiment, with its "twofold structure," endows us with a "double allegiance": on one hand, we are bound by the laws of the natural world in virtue of our bodily existence, and on the other, we break away from those laws through action in the dimension of freedom. 13The entailments of this embodied aspect of human existence will come to the fore when we discuss the incorporation of technologies into everyday life in such a way that they become transparent in experience and participate in the constitution of the self.
One upshot of this ontological ambiguity described by de Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Ricoeur is that we can, to some extent, act upon and change ourselves through our own effortswe can constitute our selves.Another upshot of the ambiguity is that, with regard to self-constitution, it allows for both disintegration -Sartre's bad faith when the subject consents to it and de Beauvoir's sexual oppression when the lapse of transcendence into facticity is inflicted upon the subjectand integration.That is, the continuity and coherence of a self, of a person's life depend on the integration of the two dimensions of existence: the natural world whose laws we are bound to by our embodiment and the transcendence through which we break away from those laws in the dimension of freedom.Where the self is poorly integrated a person can't form the practical unity fundamental to the ability to actto be an autonomous agent.For example, de Beauvoir wrote about women limited to the dimension of factical motherhood yearning for meaning in the dimension of transcendence: Woman's inferiority … originally came from the fact that she was restricted to repeating life, while man invented reasons for living, in his eyes more essential than the pure facticity of existence; confining woman to motherhood is the perpetuation of this situation.But today she demands participation in the movement by which humanity ceaselessly tries to find justification by surpassing itself; she can only consent to give life if life has meaning; she cannot try to be a mother without playing a role in economic, political, or social life. 14woman restricted to the role of motherhood to the exclusion of other possible rolesthat of entrepreneur or politicianshe might desire to pursue will not have a coherent, integrated self of the type de Beauvoir advocated.
The construction or maintenance of a sense of integrating narrative is inscribed into many user practices aimed at achieving a sense of integrated experiencewhat Walter Benjamin referred to as Erfahrungwithin the noise of fragmentary experienceswhich Benjamin termed Erlebnis. 15Ricoeur presented his own notion of narrative identity as a solution to the traditional dilemma of having to choose between the Cartesian notion of the self as a principle of identity that remains the same throughout the diversity of its different states and the positions of, for example, David Hume and Friedrich Nietzsche, who held an identical subject to be nothing but a substantialistic illusion.We will see below how auditory technology can contribute to self-constitution by helping to integrate fragmentary experiences into auditory Erfahrungen.
Another way of constructing and maintaining an integrated sense of self is by distancing or isolating ourselves into both physical and imaginary spaces in which an identity can take shape.We can do so with the help of architecturedoors, windowsor by "masking," or creating personal sound spaces that are louder than our surrounding soundscape, for example.We can also do so by creating a personal space that transcends geometrical space and constitutes an imaginary site of experience, the sort of sanctuary or shelter Gaston Bachelard referred to in The Poetics of Spacethe vital space we inhabit as a home in which a personal narrative can be constituted, a habitat where one is most intimately situated and which scaffolds our sense of who we are. 16We will see below how personalized auditory technologies can provide such intimate spaces where the self can be constituted.

Social Ambiguity
But the self is also constituted within a third dimension of the ontological foundation of human existence that helps define the space of self-constitution: that of intersubjectivity.If a self is to cohere, it must be integrated in this dimension as well.As Sartre notes, in addition to the ambiguities of facticity/transcendence and perceiver/ perceived, human reality involves yet another ambiguity: "its being-for-itself implies complementarily a beingfor-others." 17Others are both subjects and objects for me, and just as I am both subject and object for myself, so am I also subject and object for others.In Sartre's view, the primary experience of the other is not that I perceive her as some kind of object in which I must find a person, but I perceive the other as a subject who perceives me as an object.My experience of the other is at the same time an experience that involves my own self-experience, in which I am pre-reflectively aware that I am an object for another.Along the same lines, George Herbert Mead argued, "No hard-and-fast line can be drawn between our own selves and the selves of others, since our own selves exist and enter as such into our experience only in so far as the selves of others exist and enter as such in our experience also." 18The personalized self in its fullness is constituted out of the abstraction of the isolated core phenomenological self by occupying a place in the social dimension, in the context of interactions with other people. 19he social dimension of the self, based on the same ontological ambiguity at the heart of human existence described above, also allows for both disintegration and integration.Simone de Beauvoir speaks of the disintegration that occurs when arbitrary social schemas restrict the scope of self-conception: "Every time transcendence lapses into immanence, there is degradation of existence into 'in-itself', of freedom into facticity; this fall is a moral fault if the subject consents to it; if this fall is inflicted on the subject, it takes the form of frustration and oppression; in both cases it is an absolute evil." 20imone de Beauvoir showed how a sexist cultural discourse can restrict the coherence of the self.Michel Foucault also drew attention to the ways the socially constituted self draws upon culturally available discourses that can place constraints on the integration of the self. 21He emphasized the importance of fighting normalizing discourses one might unwittingly identify with that undermine one's ability to articulate one's own form of existence by limiting the range of possible subject positions and thus the range of possible experiences.
More recently, Catriona Mackenzie has also pointed to a disintegration that occurs when arbitrary social schemas restrict the scope of self-constitution.Mackenzie argues that one's self-conception is mediated by one's ability to imaginatively distance oneself from the mental and bodily dispositions, habits, and character traits that motivate one's actions in ways one may either not be aware of or might not be able to changethe  16 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 4-5; see also Gallagher, "Coherence in the Self-Pattern," 129. 17 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 57.18 Mead, Mind, Self and Society, 164.19 Husserl, Phänomenologische Psychologie, 210.20 de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 16.21 See, for example, his discussion of normalizing judgment in Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 178-83.factical dimension of our ontological ambiguityand to envisage alternate, transcendent possibilities for oneself through the culturally available images and representationsthe imaginative repertoireon which the imagination draws.This repertoire will incorporate social understandings of the significance and value of different types of identities as regards gender, race, ethnicity, and religion, for example.A restricted or oppressive imaginary will "constrain the imagination, enforce habitual patterns of thought, and stymie selfunderstanding and self-definition" 22 and thereby stand in the way of the practical unity necessary for the ability to be an autonomous agent.For example, Mackenzie writes the discovery of infertility, at least in our society, is commonly extremely devastating to a woman's general sense of self-worth.But just how far-reaching and generally debilitating this feeling is depends on the extent to which a woman has invested her sense of self-worth in maternity.This in turn will depend on the importance of maternity within the central social spheres of her life, on what other social opportunities are avail-able to her, and on whether there are other meaningful spheres of activity in her life from which she can gain social recognition. 23 de Beauvoir, Foucault, and Mackenzie show, self-constitution is the result not only of personal choices but also of initial background conditions, including a social dimension including ideological discourses, for instance, that distort one's self-conception.The present study will focus on the conscious auditory techmediated conception of self based on personal choices, but will also note an insidious and topical way auditory technologies transparently integrated into experiential structures take advantage of the terms of this integration to influence self-constitution on the basis of the cultural repertoire of tech giants.

The Auditory Dimension of the Technological Self
Based on the general framework for thinking about self-constitution presented above, let us now consider the particularities of self-constitution in the auditory dimension and the implications of technological mediation in this regard.

The Auditory Self
Before considering how the technological mediation of auditory experience participates in self-constitution, a word on how the auditory dimension of self-constitution is established more broadly in terms of acoustic maps.When events with differing degrees of consciousness and emotional density occur in life, the auditory signatures that accompany the events imprint into our psyche at the intersection of heart and mind.In time, we build up a lexicon of sounds which help us recognize safe and unsafe situations, good and bad outcomes, and fearful and delightful anticipation.Acoustic memories thus get laid down on an inner spatial grid, giving us a sense of place, allowing us to navigate our surroundings (recall that the inner ear is the seat of bodily equilibrium) and recognize safe situations and giving experiences that are common and familiar perceptual priority over those that are new.The auditory maps we dwell in constitute the space of familiarity and belonging to our surroundings. 24They constitute the type of personal space we mentioned above (Section 2.1.),which transcends geometrical space and scaffolds our sense of who we are.
Auditory technologies inflect how the inner auditory grids that give us a sense of place are laid down.To consider how this is taking place today, it will be helpful to recall some of the historical background in which The Auditory Dimension of the Technologically Mediated Self  5 auditory technologies arose and developed.Among many transformations unleashed by the phonograph and the telephone in the late nineteenth century, 25 I would like to highlight two: 1. Auditory technology for recording and transmitting sound enabled experiential access to distal spatiotemporal dimensions.As a result, spatial specificity was overlain by an alternative form of presenceand therefore identityin which proximate space becomes consumed by the far away.2. The fragmentation and personalization of auditory spaces, thanks to increasing urbanization.As auditory experience in growing urban environments that were no longer held together into acoustic communities by church bell towers became increasingly fragmented, we began to dwell increasingly within personal acoustic perimeters of our own design.This was partly due to a change in the relationship between visual and auditory experience.As Georg Simmel put it, "The interpersonal relationships of people in big cities are characterized by a markedly greater emphasis on the use of the eyes than of the ears.… Before buses, railroads, and trains became fully established during the nineteenth century, people were never in a position to have to stare at one another for minutes or even hours on end without exchanging words." 26That urban social space filled with atomized individuals retreating into individualized spaces, studiously avoiding eye contact on public transportation or busy city sidewalks When the new technologies of recording and transmitting sound arrived, people developed strategies of placing themselves "elsewhere" in urban environments where auditory spaces during urban commutes were not filled in with any sort of intrinsically meaningful sounds.Hence, the increasingly privatized space of hearing became a site ready to be occupied by meaning.As Michael Stocker put it, "Increasingly, layers of sound were filling in the cracks where our unattended imaginations might wander." 27And those increasingly privatized spaces became mobile as well, thanks, among other things, to the automobile, headphones, personal workstations, the personal entertainment center, and Internet browsers.
So, for instance, mobile sites of listening like cars, personal stereos (like the Walkman), and then eventually today's multifunctional smartphones made a plethora of curated auditory experiences possiblelike podcasts, audiobooks, and museum tours in addition to music.Mobile listening devices would play an important role in developing strategies to manage auditory experience by overlaying the Erlebnis comprising the haphazard sensations and information that characterize a commercialized world of mass media with meaningful Erfahrung.

The Muting of the Other
One result of the fragmentation of auditory experience into personalized private spaces was that the presence of other people tended to become somewhat diluted in everyday experience.I have written elsewhere about the ways our involvement in distal technologically mediated spatiotemporal spaces and particularly the new forms of curation offered by portable listening devices and automobiles entailed the muting of the voices of other people, represented ontologically by Sartre's concept of the look and Levinas' concept of the face. 28n short, the argument is that the disintegration of meaningful auditory experience in community life has reduced contact, both in frequency and in depth, with the other people who are directly present in our increasingly urban environments.In the process, the possibility of chance, serendipitous encounters with others that might constitute the basis for meaningful communication and community has been diluted.In addition, there is a danger that people will find themselves in self-sorting social echo chambers cut off from other self-sorting communities with potentially noxious consequences.
This muting of the other has had an impact on self-constitution, too.Muting of the other doesn't only dampen the presence of others in our experience and our involvements but also stunts how we conceive of ourselves.As William James wrote, "properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind.… we may practically say that [man] has as many different social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares.He generally shows a different side of himself to each of these different groups." 29

Goffman's Theatrical Framework
The ways this presentation of different sides of oneself can be seen in greater detail if we consider the constitution of the self in terms of Erving Goffman's theatrical model, which casts Shakespeare's observation that all the world's a stage in a theoretical frame presented in The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life involving a stage, a backstage area, roles, and an audience.It should be noted that although Goffman concedes that the framework is characteristic of social interactions in Anglo-American society, he notes that it is abstract enough to be applicable to any social establishment. 30The reason for this is that it captures a fundamental set of truths regarding the social constitution of the self in human experience generally.For this reason, it sits well with the ontological foundations of the account I have presented above.In addition, Goffman's framework will enable us to highlight how not only alterity, but self-constitution is inflected by the increasing mobilization and personalization of auditory technologies.
So, Goffman writes, "When an individual appears before others, he knowingly and unwittingly projects a definition of the situation, of which a conception of himself is an important part." 31Goffman compares that projection to a theatrical performance in which the structure of the self is constituted before an audience.His framework encompasses an abundance of parallels between the world of the theater and that of self-presentation and constitution, but for our purposes, we will focus on the ideas of front and back regions, the information available to different roles, and the regions each has access to.In Goffman's framework, then, there is a back region corresponding to the backstage area, and a front region corresponding to the stage. 32Performers will present themselves differently in each region.A server in a restaurant, for example, might present one persona, laid back and familiar, with the kitchen staffthe back regionand another, pleasant but reserved and formal, as soon as she goes through the swinging door into the dining areathe front region.There will be a team of personsthe maître d', bussers, chef, sous-chefs, etc.whose activity on and off stage in conjunction with available props will constitute the scene from which the performed character's self will emerge, and another team, the audience, whose interpretive activity will be necessary for this emergence.Of course, the server in our example will also present herself in a certain way to her workmates in the kitchen and in a different way to her close friends, her parents' friends, or a love interest.In each case, there will be front and back regions.She might be uninhibited with a close friend who she nevertheless keeps certain secrets from, affable but reticent about her nightlife with her parents' friends, and eager to show her best side and unforthcoming about previous relationships with a love interest."The self," writes Goffman, "is a product of all of these arrangements, and in all of its parts bears the marks of this genesis." 33 29 James, The Principles of Psychology, 281-2.30 Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 239. 31 Ibid., 242.32 Ibid., 128.33 Ibid., 252.The Auditory Dimension of the Technologically Mediated Self  7 People in Goffman's scheme may play the roles of performers, audience, and outsiders.These last neither perform nor observe the show and are therefore excluded from both back and front regions.Most buildings, for example, with rooms in them used as front and back regions, are cut off from the outside world by the outer walls of the building.Goffman calls people who are outside the building and therefore not privy to what is happening inside outsiders. 34The different roles can be distinguished based on 1) the information available to each (the performers know the impression they produce as well as backstage information about the show, the audience knows what they have been allowed to perceive, and outsiders, who are privy neither to the backstage nor the stage, know neither) and 2) the regions each has access to (performers appear in front and back regions, audience only in front, and outsiders are excluded from both).Thus, audiences are prevented from seeing backstage and outsiders are prevented from experiencing a performance that is not addressed to them.Goffman's scheme describes a dynamic field of self-constitution in which we modulate the roles we play and the information we disclose about ourselves depending on the people we are engaged with and the situations we are in.
These aspects of the theatrical metaphor call attention to its particular relevance in the context of the experiences in virtual spaces made possible by the integration of technological tools into embodied structures of experience.As Sherry Turkle has noted, window-based computer operating systems make it possible for a user to exist in several worlds, playing many roles, at the same time.Thus, "Windows have become a powerful metaphor for thinking about the self as a multiple distributed system." 35And digital windows not only give us access to a variety of spaces; they make usor aspects of ourselvesaccessible as well, and therefore allow us to extend Goffman's theatrical framework into cyberspace.If I am at home talking with a colleague on a video conferencing call using a laptop, I might present a front-region image of myself from the waist up, which is visible on screen, in a shirt and tie but keep my slippered feet in the off-screen back region.As we shall see, sound technologies make possible an analogous sort of "auditory window."

Goffman's Framework Mediated by Personalized, Mobile Technologies
Let us now consider how personalized, mobile technologies affect the different roles that define the theatrical situation, particularly the information available to each and the regions each has access to.
First, by excluding the outside world auditorily with headphones or physically in carsthat is, by limiting the information available to othersthe users of personal, mobile listening devices can structure their "insides" and create a "free," "orderly," and "mobile" space for themselves.By doing so, they create meaning -Erfahrungen, in the form of a panoply of auditory phenomena ranging from music to audiobooks and telephone conversationsagainst a background of fragmented Erlebnis in the outside world (such as a metro car or tram rattling on its rails, snippets of conversation, public transportation announcements, music overflowing onto a sidewalk from a restaurant, car horns, screeching brakes, or a helicopter overhead).Whether this personal, backstage area be sharedfor example, if people share a headphone jack or ride together in a caror individually, it is the site where mobile listeners manage the inner Erfahrungen that then imprints into our psyche.In the process, we lay down a personal, inner spatial grid of acoustic memories that get integrated into our narrative identity and constitute the habitat, the space of familiarity and belonging that gives us a sense of who we are. 36ow, though the information available to the user of the personal listening device or the car is unavailable to others, it is a bit more complicated with regard to access.There is certainly a sense in which the inner auditory habitat becomes, in Goffman's terms, a backstage area in which a dimension of the self is inaccessible.If there is any constitution of self in this context, it takes place mostly in the context of the rehearsals in an area freed from the pressures of performance before an audience.I say "mostly," however, because though there is a sense in which a person wearing headphones or in a car is in their own world, backstage, graspable only as exteriority, that person is not completely unaware of the look or face of the other, which is not eclipsed entirely by the inner soundscape, but merely muted.
When we are backstage, which is typically out of bounds for an audience, we can relax, step out of character, slouch, and engage in what Goffman calls "minor physical self-involvements," such as humming, and toe-tapping. 37Among the minor physical self-involvements, Goffman lists belching and flatulence. 38Most people, however, even if they're wearing headphones (and thus feel in a sense as if they were looking out from behind a two-way mirror that allows them to look out but prevents others from looking in), would still maintain a residual sense of being on a dimmed stageeven if there's no performance going onand therefore not belt out a song as they might in the shower, for example.So, information is denied to audiences and outsiders, but access is not cut off completely as it might be by stage curtains.It is merely diminished.I might have to remove my earphones to engage with someone asking me for directions on a busy street, for example, and I am not completely unaware of my exterior like Sartre's peeping Tom until he is caught looking through the keyhole.I retain a dimmed sense of my body as a sort of physical placeholder, graspable by others, and therefore refrain from, say, picking my nose.
Access be not only dimmed, but intentionally regulated as well.Personal stereos can be used as personal boundary demarcators and interpersonal mediators.When people put headphones on, they become publicly invisible, disappearing as interacting subjects.As Bull notes, "Female users describe using the personal stereo as a barrier to discourse in which the use of it represents a sign that the user is 'somewhere else' or 'fully occupied'.It performs the same role as a 'do not disturb' sign […]." 39 Access may also be regulated with the mediation of a mobile telephone.A person who answers a mobile telephone turns an auditory backstage area into a front end at the press of a button (tap on a screen, voice command, etc.).Interestingly, however, in the case of an audio-only call, while the shared auditory space opened up by the connection is a sort of stage area calling for the appropriate roles, depending on the callers and the context, the visual environments of each interlocutor remain in the backstage area they were in before the connection was made.In the case of a call with both audio and video, the visual front end is limited to what is visible on the other's screen.Thus, the rather schizophrenic situation in which a man might be wearing a suit jacket and tie in the visual front end, but sweat pants and slippers in the visual back end.
In addition, access can be regulated not only intentionally, but also implicitly, by norms of privacy which carry over from situations that aren't technologically mediated like those we've been considering.So, according to Helen Nissenbaum, there is a sense of contextual integrity that governs norms of privacy even outside intimate or sensitive realms such as my bedroom or my computer's password manager.Such norms can be seen at work "in the indignation that may follow a simple gesture as a stranger asking a person his or her name in a public square." 40Nissenbaum's contextual integrity dictates that in the context of a public square, there is a sense in which my name is private.Similarly, although a person might use my mobile phone to have a conversation about her sick aunt while on a bus, offering my condolences after she hung up would be a breach of contextual integrity and thus of privacy, even though I had access to the conversation (at least her side of it, though the voices of distal interlocutors can sometimes be made out as well).Although the conversation took place on stage, so to speak, contextual integrity deems it to have taken place in a backstage area.
John Stuart Mill provides another reason for the importance of the back region for self-constitution.Generally speaking, for Mill, private life provides the emotional and intellectual space to reflect on unpopular ideas without the pressure of social disapproval and thus enables individuals to form independent views on social issues.A person completely open to public scrutiny would feel pressure to conform to convention, thereby suffering a loss of autonomy, uniqueness, and a sense of personal identity.Mill recognized the need for individuals to find refuge from the tyranny of social conformity and resist its pressure to suppress individuality.Individuals living in a repressive society "exercise choice only among things commonly done.
 37 Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 128.38 Idem.39 Bull, Sounding Out the City, 104.40 Nissenbaum, "Protecting Privacy in an Information Age," 584.
The Auditory Dimension of the Technologically Mediated Self  9 they become incapable of any strong wishes or native pleasures, and are generally without either opinions or feelings of home growth, or properly their own." 41In Mackenzie and Foucault's terms, narrowing the cultural repertoire and thereby shrinking the palette of options for self-constitution to that which is within the scope of normalizing discourses.

The Technologically Mediated Regulation of Auditory Information and Access with Regard to Self-Constitution
So what do these considerations regarding the regulation of auditory information and access mean with regard to selfhood?In all of these situations, whatever access there is to information or areas in the theater of self-constitution, such access necessarily goes hand in hand with a restriction of access.As Don Ihde points out in Technology and the Lifeworld, when technological tools are embodied phenomenologically, they "simultaneously magnify or amplify and reduce or place aside what is experienced through them." 42In addition, they are often multistablethat is, they are compatible with a range of different experiential and practical contexts. 43In the context of technologically mediated information and access, this means that the contribution made by others to self-constitution is augmented in certain ways and diminished in others.Thus, in one sense the social imaginary repertoire Mackenzie refers to, which we draw from to constitute the self, is augmented thanks to the contributions of other people in distal spatiotemporal contexts.We can communicate with greater numbers of people and be exposed to a greater gamut of ideas thanks to the Internet, for example, which can enrich the process of self-constitution.For Mackenzie as for Foucault, expanding the cultural repertoire and thereby enriching the palette of options for self-constitution would make it possible to escape the limitations of Procrustean normalizing discourses.However, the muting or blocking out of other voices can have clear negative effects, too.Selective exposure to congenial channels can produce what has been referred to as an epistemic bubble 44 involving a tunnel "vision" or echo-chamber effect.In such an echo-chamber, exposure to people and ideas outside it is reduced and information repeated inside it by like-minded peopleechoed back to themover and over again may become amplified and/or distorted.Other voices are distrusted, undermined or simply silenced and thus the imaginary repertoire we draw on for self-constitution is impoverished. 45People in our immediate world are excluded from Goffman's theater and thereby made outsiders, with no access to the stage (or backstage) where the self is constituted.And yet people outside my echo chambers can contribute to a self which is more resilient and more fit to engage in a functioning democracy, for example. 46

Surreptitious Outsider Access to the Back Region
Another, incidental effect of augmenting my access to others (and access to myself) who do not share my geographical location at the price of excluding others present alongside me becomes evident when we consider some of the entailments of the embodiment of technological toolslike mobile telephonesso they become transparent in experience.For there are outsiderspowerful corporations like Alphabet (Google), Amazon, and Meta Platforms (which owns and operates Instagram and WhatsApp), whose business models center around the for-profit capture and commodification of personal dataendowed with a form of informational access provided by mobile devices that circumvents experience.It is as if they were looking through a two-way mirror, seeing and yet unseen.On top of Merleau-Ponty's basic corporeal structures that lay down the immanent topography of the experiential world is another topography characterized by features reflecting the powers not only of one's own body, but also the powers of the mobile telephone.As we noted above, the immanent topography reflecting one's bodily powers is possible because the body is continuous with the world, part of the flesh of the world.And this continuity is expressed in the essential ambiguity of embodimentwe are both perceivers and perceivedthat structures all experience, including technologically mediated experience.Thanks to our embodiment we are bound, on one hand, by the laws of the natural world in virtue of our bodily experience and we break away, on the other, from the laws of nature governing our factical embodiment through action in the dimension of freedom.But when the stage on which our selfconstitution takes place (particularly the backstage) becomes accessible to outsidersthat is, actors that appear neither in the back region nor in the social front region as fellow performers or audience membersour fundamental ability, which grows out of our embodiment, to act in the dimension of freedom is compromised.
Tech giants like Facebook and Google, who are poised to listen in on what happens in both front and back regions, are ostensibly interested in providing a service to those whose activities they capturequick, relevant search results, purchases, or posts from friends, family, and interest groups enabling them to keep in touch with people and events.However, as the phrase "If it's free, you're the product" indicates, a large majority of Facebook and Google's total revenues come from advertising based on behavior patterns pieced together from the digital traces we leave behind as we lead our non-digital lives.They play a technical rolethat of service specialists, whether for social media users or advertisers.However, it is a role that is not scripted within the context of the theater of self-constitution.Tech giants are accessing increasing amounts of personal information and other types of data (which is then used to make inferences about users) and then apply algorithms to tailor recommendations for products, films, search results, and accommodations to users.The ways their algorithmic black boxes are deployed to access aspects of user behavior are increasingly hidden and resistant to scholarly scrutiny, especially after the Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2014. 47espite such scandals, however, the pressure generated by the for-profit capture and commodification of personal data does not seem to be abating, as may be seen in one careful study 48 that is particularly relevant to the context of the auditory dimension of technologically mediated experience examined the privacy policies and terms of use of Spotify found that the company has been collecting increasing amounts personal information in their ostensible quest to provide personalized services.This information is used not only to personalize playlists.The study shows, for instance, according to Spotify's terms of use, "an algorithm could be influenced by factors extrinsic to the user, like commercial deals with artists and labels." 49Even more worrisome, though, is a change in Spotify's privacy policy made in 2021 that enables Spotify to collect voice data, supposedly to develop its technologies and services, particularly in the light of a patent Spotify was granted on 12 January 2021 for computer procedures able to process voices and background noise to retrieve speech content and environmental metadata. 50According to the authors of the study, the privacy policy and the patent taken together suggest a change in the platform's recommendation algorithm to capture voice data.Such procedures would then, on the face of it, be used to recommend personalized content to users.However, concerns that new algorithms will be created to shape the user's choice architecture and influence the ability of users to freely navigate their inner soundscapes are justified.
This highlights how tech giants might be privileging certain types of behavior while suppressing others and thereby potentially reducing individual autonomous agency.This might happen in the experiential dimension, if the sense of agency is eroded, as in the common experience of noting that the experiential field has been suspiciously populated by items like ads and then realizing that, although their presence corresponds in some causal sense to previous actions on my part, there is an element of that causality that escapes my The Auditory Dimension of the Technologically Mediated Self  11 conscious intentionality.We thus become aware that our experience is being shaped in eerie ways that, although rooted (through my history of clicking) in the agency which is a foundational aspect of my sense of self, is also rooted in a surreptitious way with an insidious, underground causal current driven by outsiders with their own agendas who have tapped into the embodied pre-reflective structures underlying intentionality.When we are not fully active participants modulating the roles we play and thereby curating the self we present depending on the people we are engaged with and the access we decide to give them, there is a worrying sense in which we cannot be said to be fully autonomous self-constituting agents.

Conclusion
In this article, I have examined and tried to clarify the ways in which the auditory dimension of the self is constituted through the mediation of technology so we may be better equipped to understand and deal with such mediated forms of self-constitution.I have shown that by excluding our immediate surroundings with mobile personalized and private auditory technologies, we are increasingly laying down a personal, inner spatial grid of acoustic memories that get integrated into our narrative identity and co-constitutes the habitat, the space of familiarity and belonging that gives us a sense of who we are.By applying Goffman's theatrical framework of self-constitution to the auditory dimension of self-constitution, I have shown how the technologically mediated regulation of information and access to the different areas relevant to self-performance has an impact on self-constitution.In this context, the contribution made by others to self-constitution is augmented in certain ways and diminished in others: on one hand, the social imaginary repertoirethe culturally available images and representations on which the imagination draws to constitute the selfis augmented thanks to the contributions of other people in distal spatiotemporal contexts; on the other, the muting or blocking out of other voices can have clear negative effects, too.Dampening the presence of others in our experience and involvement stunts how we conceive of ourselves.Moreover, selective exposure to congenial forms of social contact can produce an epistemic bubble involving a tunnel "vision" or echo-chamber effect.In addition, due to the coupling of bodily and cognitive structures with mobile, privatized auditory technologies that thereby become transparent in experience, tech giants have the power to privilege certain types of behavior while suppressing others and thereby reducing the individual autonomous agency so important to self-constitution.It follows from these conclusions that the increased use of mobile, privatized auditory technologies mediating our experience generally and the auditory dimension of self-constitution more particularly calls for increased attention to the types of experience that get filtered out, especially our experience of other people and the cultural imaginary repertoire we draw on to constitute the self so that we don't end up making Procrustean beds we will then have to lie in.

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For example, Schafer, Our Environment and the Soundscape; Bull, Sounding Out the City; Sterne, The Audible Past; Pinch and Bijsterveld, The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies; Sterne, The Sound Studies Reader; Chion, Sound.26 Quoted in Benjamin, Walter Benjamin, 191.27 Stocker, Hear Where We Are, 24.28 Gutierrez, "The Muting of the Other."  34 Ibid., 135.35 Turkle, Life on the Screen, 14. 36 Bull, Sounding Out the City, 156.

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For example, Bruns, "After the 'APIcalypse';" Eriksson et al.Spotify Teardown.48 Bartlett et al. "Analysing Privacy Policies and Terms of Use to Understand Algorithmic Recommendations," 126.49 Ibid, 126.50 Hulaud, "United States Patent United States patent US 10,891,948 B2. 12 January 2021." According to Sartre, we transcend who we factically are.A human being is what it is not and is not what it is.Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Paul Ricoeur, among others, emphasize the corporeal aspect of this ambiguity.De Beauvoir writes of "the drama of flesh and spirit, and of finitude and transcendence, [that] plays itself out […]" in the human condition. 10  2 Bull, Sounding Out the City.3 Weber, "Head Cocoons." 4 Bijsterveld et al., Sound and Safe. 5 Ibid., 179.6 Sterne, The Audible Past; Hagood, "Quiet Comfort." 7 De Kosnik, "Is Twitter a Stage?;" Schroeder, Social Theory after the Internet; Bullingham and Vasconcelos, "The Presentation of Self in the Online World." 8 Zahavi, "The Experiential Self." facticity and a transcendence." 9  22 Mackenzie, "Imagining Oneself Otherwise," 294.23 Ibid., 293.24 On cognitive maps generally, e.g., Ingold, The Perception of the Environment, 219-42; on acoustic maps, for example, Carpenter and McLuhan, Explorations in Communication, 65-70; and Stocker, Hear Where We Are, 29.