On the topics of digital storytelling, "new literacies" plus re-mixing and so on. It is clear that narrative is being substantively reformed by phenomena related to pervasive, networked media tools and strategies. The shape of the Story in transmission is now infinitely variable, and this creates a significant challenge for both storyteller (transmitter) and the audience (receiver). The "Fake News" story is a case in point. The tension between virtuality and veracity is palpable throughout the circuitous Social, which is embodied by the narratives that people attach to their behaviors, driven by beliefs that create and are created by the Story and repetitive transmissions of it. The accelerating pace of "technological"/social (virtual>analog) conversion of formal community hardly softens the profound effects of sense(d) displacement for people. The shifting structural topology on the mechanisms for generating pronouncing the imagination, whether that transmission is intimate or general is migrating from nature to artificial sources. Giving voice and/or sign to the inner life of people in the particular and collective is essential to sustainable community exchange. Orientation - from nature to machine - changes, but we have no idea to what extent that change is constructive and/or destructive. Not only is the change happening IRT, it is occurring within Networked Reality (NR) as a complex. We do however have enough evidence to suggest caution is in order. The means of ensuring free thought and speech are currently stressed. The space for protected storytelling is being co-opted by powerful entities at an alarming rate, and those entities do not necessarily align with prioritized civil liberties for all on a spherical scale of equality.
Along these lines, the practice of listening is evolving into a vaguely performative act, a specialty with attendant pantomimes derived from non-cultural ideologies, including psychotherapy, sociology, anthropology, etc. Witness Hillary Clinton's "listening tour." Critique and deconstruction of such programmatic exercises would be valuable, perhaps extending to a new discipline of secondary analysis. A comparative practice might involve study of what we might call the mode "Listening for Survival" and other modes (e.g., "Listening for Pleasure"). Medical science has accrued much data on human hearing and technologies for sound amplification and reduction are manifold, as are the relevant analytic data associated with countless instances of testing, etc. In short Hearing has its own massive database. One thing that's worth examining is the tech-enabled disruption of traditional methods of teaching listening. Another is the evacuation or destruction of "quiet space," and re-/displacement by programmatic noise. I am speaking not of Nechvatal's ultimately creative noise, but the polluting kind. Another is the impulsive filler saturating the interstices among meaning objects in conversation, both formal and and informal, which may be a symptom of these other things. The teaching of mindful relation to all sound (and silence) is an ancient practice among many cultures, and may be a basic element in the formation of meaning in thinking and conveyance.