Jacob Smith (1)

Another good academic book about the social meaning of technology. Smith explores various ways in which recorded and amplified sound was used to create a new kind of performer (crooner, rasper) who didn’t need to project his/her voice across a crowded auditorium, and how this interacted with race and gender assumptions and anxieties—the crooner could get up close and personal with his imagined-female listeners, but without the robust physical exertion of earlier singers. I found his discussion of “blue discs,” recorded pornography (or usually risque jokes, at least from his descriptions), particularly interesting from a fannish perspective, since he discusses the transgressive implications of women speaking desire—though the jokiness defused some of that tension. I am increasingly interested in podfic and how it embodies a women-saying-sexy-stuff-for-women fannish practice; the blue discs were for men or mixed company, though unlike burlesque or later striptease they did often feature female voices. Whereas Smith argues that humor reduced the risk of voicing sexuality, he notes that the distance permitted by a recorded performance did so too; yet the blue discs he discusses were still mostly jokey. Podfic seems to take more advantage of the reduced risk in terms of being seriously sexual—though I have speculated that what gets podficced tends to have less dubcon/noncon than fic generally, though that’s a highly subjective impression filtered through my specific experiences. Also with fannish resonances, Smith suggests that many blue discs were produced in off-hours by professionals in the industry (I don’t think that many podficcers record pro audio, but I do think that we see a lot of pro skills deployed for fannish purposes).… (meer)