Podcasting, Memorry, Playlists, and the Postmodern Self

It is a pleasant feeling probably to reach a point in the development of one's sensibility that one might go back and re-listen radio broadcasts that have accompanied one through past stages of everyday life. It is not only that we now have podcasts to go with the soundtrack of our life but also we have an access to them in a manner completely dissociated from their proper chronology. They usher us into a post-temporal dimension of media experience that puts every point of the time-line of their original occurrence into the same plane of immanence of digital mediation. Thus, digital formats become second order mediatizations of media content where the personal chronologies of listening and viewing become reshuffled way past a live sense of contact with time towards a whole new additional layer of picking and choosing, virtual flanerie, museumized consciousness. No doubt, it is the combination of particular hardware and software, media management practices and conditions of their mutual availability that confine this sensibility to some parts of the world. However, as these conditions and their local equivalents reach further beyond to become globally ubiquitous, one could speak of the deleglement des senses on a properly global scale.