The Networked Voice

Who speaks for whom online? This has been the question at the center of my Ego Media research. It might seem like a strange thing to ask; after all, wasn’t the promise of Web 2.0 precisely that we would get a platform to express ourselves, cutting out the gatekeepers and mediators, the spin and censorship? If anything, though, digital media have affirmed what scholars of life writing and auto/biography have long argued: that we never simply speak for ourselves and ourselves alone, that “personal” identity is profoundly relational and “otherness… can be constitutive of selfhood as such.”^1,2 In many ways this is cause for celebration. By opening up new means of speaking to, for, and as others, and by putting new kinds of avatars at users’ disposal, digital technologies have fostered playfulness, intimacy, solidarity, candor, and creative expression. At the same time, however, they have facilitated novel and troubling forms of dissimulation and dehumanization, expropriation, profiteering, and surveillance.

There are, then, many ways into the question of who speaks for whom in digital culture. For those worried that malevolent acts of impersonation and bad faith communication are corroding the networked public sphere, this question might evoke trolls and propagandists, “sockpuppets,”³ “sea-lions,”⁴ “astroturfers,”⁵ and identity thieves. Others might hear it as referring to the rise of “hyperleaders”⁶: figures who become the voice of a moment, a movement or a generation by making large constituencies feel represented and heard. Others still might hear it in terms of “surveillance capitalism”⁷ or “platform capitalism,”⁸ observing that, insofar as web users’ conversations serve to bulk out data sets on which proprietary machine learning algorithms are trained, those users are unwittingly speaking “for” the algorithms’ owners.

My Ego Media research has addressed questions of voice and identity from a number of angles.⁹ One strain of this research has focused on YouTubers who make “whisper videos” tailored to the needs of the stressed and the sleepless¹⁰; another has looked at cosmopolitan Victorian poets whose acts of ekphrastic ventriloquism have seen them acclaimed as icons by queer microbloggers;¹¹ another still has considered how grime musicians use lyrical avatars to articulate autobiographical accounts of “diasporic citizenship.”^12,13 From the outside, I appreciate that the links between these various subprojects may not be immediately apparent. My two essays for this publication – this one, on the topic of the networked voice, and a second on the (overlapping) topic of avatars – are intended to make those links clearer, placing the various strands of my research within an overarching framework while also discussing a range of contextualizing examples. It is perhaps inevitable that these essays should have something of a scrapbook feel – they are, after all, the fruit of work conducted over the course of a very eventful five-year period in the life of the internet. Mindful of this, I’ve attempted to boil my findings down into a set of propositions. While I’m aware that there is a danger, here, of slipping into the register of the online listicle, I hope that this format will bring out how particular examples serve to illustrate more general tendencies in contemporary digital culture.

As Freya Jarman observes, “the voice and the self are… intimately linked in our cultural imagination.”¹⁴ But voices can also destabilize identities and identifications, “forcing,” in Jarman’s words, “an oscillation between subject and object that crosses crucial thresholds.”¹⁵ To some extent the individual voice is an index of immutable givens, shaped by physiology, biography, and culture. But speakers also change how they speak depending on who they think is listening, and voices are malleable and mimicable – not to mention technologically treatable. Alexander Weheliye argues that the advent of analog audio technologies like the phonograph had radical implications for our relationship with the voice. If there is a long-standing tendency to hear voices in terms of either “linguistic a/signfication” or “pure… sonorousness,” Weheliye holds that audio technologies trouble this tendency, reformulating the relationship between the sonic and the textual, “the phone [and] the graph,” life and writing.¹⁶ As analog inscription gives way to digital encoding, matters are becoming more complex still. Networked digital devices have already made it easier than ever to capture and share audio recordings, and this in itself has had important implications for how we encounter and hear voices. But they are also recasting the voice in more fundamental ways.

Take for example, the webpage plotting “vocal bursts… along the 24 dimensions of emotion they can reliably convey”¹⁷ that accompanied a recent American Psychologist article.¹⁸ Dragging the mouse across the browser window elicits a kind of affective glissando, short snippets of nonverbal vocalization shading from triumphant whoops into ecstatic squeals and self-conscious groans. These sounds are not only assigned meanings but broken down into their putative emotional constituents, so that a particular expression of “adoration” is determined to comprise “83% adoration, 8% desire [and] 8% sympathy,” one of “awe” is “58% awe, 17% surprise (positive), 8% amusement, 8% fear [and] 8% interest.” Or look at Google’s Duplex bot, which has found a different kind of meaning in nonverbal sounds. “Pepper[ing] its speech with ‘um,’ ‘uh,’ and ‘mmm hmm’ in order to imitate the tics and rhythms of human speech,”¹⁹ Duplex sounds impressively – not to say eerily – lifelike. A departure from the lineage of “machine voices… designed as ideal specimens” which “do not gulp, splutter or need to breathe,”²⁰ Duplex shows how the terrain of vocal significance and sonority is being redrawn as machines learn to “listen” and “speak.”

As these examples illustrate, digital technologies affirm particular understandings of what voices are and do by instantiating those understandings in code. In their diversity, they reflect the fact that while “voice is a universally relevant concept… there is no shared consensus of its meaning.”²¹ Biometric voiceprints²² and stylometric attribution software²³ present the voice as a marker of personal identity – though, far from grounding this conception in romantic notions of the individual’s ineffable and irreducible “ipseity,”²⁴ they rely on the recognition of patterns and the calculation of probabilities to do so. These technologies operate on similar principles to voice-cloning applications and procedural generation software, which understand voice as denoting a distinctive style, encompassing (but not reducible to) characteristic tones and tics, cadences and frequencies, lexical choices, and syntactical habits. Where the phonograph divorced the voice from the live context of embodied enunciation, so that what was said then and there could be heard here and now, these systems open a voice’s actual past onto virtual futures, using stylistic parameters derived from an existing corpus to generate new vocal artifacts. More prosaically, compression codecs frame recorded voices as more or less redundant acoustic information, while YouTube’s Content ID software treats them as intellectual property. Voice-activated interfaces like Siri, Alexa, or the Xbox Kinect understand the voice as a form of user input, equivalent to a button press or a command prompt, while with autotranscription, translation, and text-to-speech software the voice is primarily a vehicle for linguistic information, ideally interchangeable with writing. This transposition from speech to text might seem trivial, but it has massively augmented our ability to store, search, and analyze speech acts, for better or worse.

Different digital technologies, in short, have different working definitions of the voice, definitions that reflect their functions and priorities. Where biometric identification software disregards the linguistic dimension of speech, for transcription software it is paramount; content ID software is indifferent to how recordings affect listeners, but cares very much about who has the right to profit from the distribution of those recordings. These different priorities can, of course, come into conflict. Even as biometric listening software attempts to tie voices more securely to their owners and to guarantee the veracity of those owners’ statements, for example, developments in voice-cloning technology and text-to-speech software force us to consider how the “theft of a voice” might enable “fraud, manipulation and deception on an unimaginable scale.”²⁵ Whether vocal technologies are working as advertised, malfunctioning, or being resourcefully repurposed, then, they work to support (or undermine) particular conceptions of the voice, and it is important to acknowledge and interrogate these conceptions.

One important conception of the voice is as a marker of geographical belonging, a way of placing the speaking subject. The New York Times’ recent “British-Irish Dialect Quiz”²⁶ encapsulated this conception in a series of questions: Is it called a “sofa” or a “settee” in your household? Would you describe your friends as “pals,” “mates,” and/or “chums”? Do you pronounce “bath” with a long or a short a? Having entered their answers, quiz-takers were presented with a personalized heatmap of Britain and Ireland, with the darkest red patches signaling the strongest correspondence between the individual quiz-taker’s speech habits and regional norms. Whether we attribute the quiz’s popularity to narcissistic curiosity, local and national pride/shame, or simple boredom, these maps were much shared on social media. Alongside them users posted anecdotes from peripatetic childhoods, discussed how geography intersects with class and age, expressed delight at especially choice slang terms, or reflected on how they feel their voices are received in different places and contexts.

While the accent quiz was presented as good clean edifying fun, in a country riven by disagreements over Brexit it couldn’t help but evoke Theresa May’s invidious distinction between “citizens of nowhere” and “the people down the road.”²⁷ With racism and xenophobia on the rise, it has become ever more important to understand the role audio software plays in placing – and displacing – individuals, especially when those individuals are refugees or asylum seekers. In his 2014 account of speech analysis technologies, sound artist and “forensic listener” Lawrence Abu Hamdan discusses the kinds of algorithmic voice profiling systems that were already being used by institutions like the UK border agency as means of determining the veracity of statements, claims, and confessions.²⁸ Rather than assessing speech at the level of semantic sense, such systems treat it as biometric data, capable of contradicting what the speaker actually says and convicting them. As Abu Hamdan’s case studies illustrate, however, such attempts to automate the listening process can be fatally reductive, denying the slipperiness of the voice and the relational character of speech. By trying to assign acoustic and physiological phenomena stable, coherent meanings, and by trying to map certain pronunciations and vowel sounds to particular geographical regions, such software denies the complexities of both individual identities and interpersonal dynamics. The difficulty of making accurate judgments on the basis of low-fidelity telephone signals notwithstanding,²⁹ such techniques ignore the fact that how we pronounce a certain phoneme in a certain situation might have more to do with whom we are speaking to than where we were born or whether we are guilty, the fact that affects do not always map easily to quantifiable variables, and the fact that an accent can be, as Abu Hamdan puts it, as much a “biography of migration” as it is a marker of belonging.³⁰

That such systems are frequently grounded in “junk science” has, however, done little to dent their appeal for border agencies under increasing pressure to cut both costs and net migration figures.³¹ Their uptake requires us to reassess what it means for marginalized communities to be “given a voice.” Alexander Galloway has argued that under our “new global networks of technicity” the question is no longer (pace Gayatri Spivak) whether “the subaltern [can] speak… but where and how the subaltern speaks, or indeed is forced to speak.”³² The plight of US prisoners who must consent to “being ‘enrolled’ into a new voice surveillance system” in order to make phone calls³³ offers a disturbing example of the dynamics Galloway highlights. In their recent report for The Intercept George Jones and Debbie Nathan tell the story of an inmate faced with this “strange choice: He could go up to the phone and utter the phrases that an automated voice would ask him to read, or he could choose not to and lose his phone access altogether.”³⁴ Here the choice that we all make when using services that require us to “give up [our] data in exchange for… free use” (which Lori Andrew argues “can hardly be seen as a voluntary choice” given the power asymmetries at play³⁵) is recast in more nakedly coercive and dehumanizing terms, as a living person is compelled to repeat what an artificial voice tells him to. Already treated as a standing reserve of cheap, racialized labor by “carceral capitalism,”³⁶ here inmates are enlisted to fill out privately owned biometric databases and train voice recognition algorithms likely to be used against them.

The entangled genealogies of consumer technologies and those developed to serve the military-industrial complex and the carceral state raise difficult questions.^37,38 It is a common complaint that the underrepresentation of women, people with disabilities, and ethnic minorities in the tech industries results in software that has trouble parsing certain voices and reading certain bodies.³⁹ But when such software is increasingly central not just to exploitative forms of user surveillance, but also to discriminatory policing and border control regimes, there are good reasons to want to be illegible – to remain, in Simone Browne’s terms, “dark matter.”⁴⁰ At the same time, illegibility or “opacity” (to use a concept of Edouard Glissant’s that has proven particularly generative for theorists of digital surveillance⁴¹ – and has also been central to Rebecca Roach’s work for Ego Media) can in itself arouse suspicion. To cast this another way, while it is worrying that technologies which are currently so fallible already hold such sway over the lives of the most vulnerable, it is hardly reassuring to think that they are becoming more capable. As Btihaj Ajana suggests, we need to look beyond the question of whether or not such devices work to address the deeper ethical issues at stake, issues that touch on the nature of identity and the scope of biography. For Ajana, biometric technologies effect an “amputation of narrative from the sphere of identity.”⁴² Drawing on the work of philosophers Paul Ricoeur and Adriana Caravero, she argues that such technologies are founded on the “reduction of the person to her ‘whatness,’” ignoring “the ‘who’ element” of identity – the very element that biography brings to the fore. As Ajana puts it, “When the biometric body speaks, it speaks in a language that silences the biographical story of the person whose body is ordered to speak.”⁴³

The issue of who is heard by digital technologies and on what terms is also central to the history of compression algorithms. Such algorithms employ perceptual coding techniques, using mathematical models of human hearing to determine how much data can be discarded before the average listener notices its absence. While this might seem like a purely technical problem, Jonathan Sterne holds that Fraunhofer IIS’s development of the MPEG3 audio codec is an illuminating example of how “assumptions about subjects and aesthetics get written into a format.”⁴⁴ In recounting the codec’s history Sterne addresses the pervasive myth which accords the singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega the status of “mother of MP3.” According to this apocryphal narrative, it was mathematician and electrical engineer Karlheinz Brandenburg’s determination to capture the gossamer subtleties of Vega’s track “Tom’s Diner” that drove the development of the software; while Brandenburg’s first attempts at compressing Vega’s ‘‘warm human voice’’ resulted in “monstrous distortions,”⁴⁵ his cold masculine rationality eventually proved capable of doing justice to Vega’s balmily feminine singing.

Sterne dismantles this myth, noting that a generically varied (albeit uniformly middlebrow) range of tracks was used to test the software, that Brandenburg was one collaborator among many, and that he has never “publicly claimed to be the sole inventor of MP3.”⁴⁶ But while Sterne rejects Hilmar Schmundt’s assertion “that every MP3 replicates the way that Brandenburg heard Vega,” he also insists “there is a different truth in the story” – the truth of how ingrained “notions about the female voice, authenticity,” and “purity” are, and of our inability to perceive that voices we hear as “pure” are in fact “heavily processed.”^47,48 As with many pop vocals, Vega’s singing in “Tom’s Diner” is “bathed in artificial reverberation” and “compressed to limit the dynamic range of her voice—a technique so standard in popular vocal recording that recorded voices sound strange without it.”⁴⁹ The MP3 format, then, was designed not to faithfully capture the qualities of the live voice, but in accordance with the (heavily stylized, technologically facilitated, ineluctably gendered, and racialized) conventions of pop vocal performance.

While we might seem to be a long way from the prisoner required to enroll his voice in a biometric database, for musicologist and philosopher Robin James the logic of compression codecs is of a piece with neoliberal biopolitics’ deployment of supposedly objective “mathematical model[s] of human life” to justify “remov[ing] people from eligibility for moral and political personhood on the assumption that they will not be missed.”⁵⁰ Here, as in the cases of “pattern discrimination” addressed by Florian Cramer, systems that claim to be “devoid of any interpretation and thus of any bias” allow old prejudices to sneak back in “through the back door.”⁵¹ Failing to take into account the material realities of inequality and prejudice, putatively neutral processes end up entrenching and perpetuating those realities, in another instance of how (as Lisa Nakamura puts it) “the ‘color-blind’ replaces the color-line as the prevailing practice that permits resources to be unequally allocated based on racial identities.”⁵²

James too finds the mother of MP3 myth instructive as a parable about gender politics. In her version Vega gives voice to an “idealized white hetero femininity,” articulating the kind of “warmth (intimacy, care work)” patriarchy desires and requires from women, while the software developed by Brandenburg’s team embodies patriarchy’s disinclination to “to hear anything beyond or other than that.”⁵³ Vega, in this reading, performatively embodies the same qualities that AIVAs (artificially intelligent virtual assistants) like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa are expected to articulate.⁵⁴ As Heather Suzanne Woods contends, these devices are designed to project “a feminine persona which mobilizes traditional conservative values of homemaking, care-taking and administrative ‘pink collar’ labour”⁵⁵ – the kind of labor once performed by the female switchboard operators addressed in Eleanor Carmi’s work on histories of content moderation⁵⁶ and placed center stage in Caroline Martel’s dazzling archival documentary The Phantom of the Operator.⁵⁷

For proof that fantasies of white heterofeminine purity continue to inform how real women’s voices are heard we might look to the media panic over “vocal fry.” Associated with social media stars like the Kardashian sisters, studies have determined that this low-pitched, husky mode of speaking makes women “sound less competent, less trustworthy, less educated and less hireable,” endangering their job prospects and their laryngeal health alike.⁵⁸ As one Vice journalist put it (in an account of his girlfriend’s experiences of speech therapy saturated in Vice’s trademark ironic-or-is-it? misogyny), “even when the actual words coming out of her mouth are well-chosen and witty, the way they're delivered can be so grating it’s hard to pay attention.”⁵⁹

Though the stakes are perhaps not so high for these women as for asylum seekers facing deportation by algorithmic fiat, there are similarities in how the voice is framed as a potential liability, all too capable of saying the wrong thing about its owner. Portrayed by pundits as an epidemic spread by reality stars and social media influencers, the vocal fry panic reflected fears of viral media leaving us susceptible to mimetic contagion, while suggesting our voices must be worked on, refined, and disciplined if we are to be heard. Even as commentators like Naomi Wolf acknowledged the “gender-political” dimension of the vocal fry panic, they also argued that the solution was for the women supposedly afflicted to train themselves to speak differently – rather than, say, asking listeners to suspend their prejudices and hear differently. Insisting on the importance of “hav[ing] a strong voice rather than a very breathy voice” Wolf’s Guardian article positioned such training as part of a self-affirming voyage of discovery that would result in women finding their true voices⁶⁰ – a message entirely in keeping with the neoliberal imperative to understand ourselves as entrepreneurial, self-reliant individuals, always acquiring new aptitudes and working on our weaknesses as we seek to improve our prospects and set ourselves apart. Sophie Bishop’s work on vlogging provides a useful counterpoint to such rhetoric. As she notes, “Popular beauty blogger Zoella had a notably broader West country accent prior to being signed by talent agency GleamFutures,”⁶¹ but began to speak in something closer to “received pronunciation”⁶² thereafter. Bishop attributes this shift to the fact that the speech-to-text software YouTube uses to extract keywords from videos is “riddled with errors, favouring crisp and clear spoken English and discriminating against regional accents.”⁶³ While it is of course possible that Zoella has undertaken a romantic journey of vocal self-discovery à la Wolf, it seems likelier that Gleam have helped her to reshape her voice to ensure that her videos are optimally comprehensible to YouTube.

Such case studies betray a tendency to hear the voice – and everything else – through the filter of “human capital.”⁶⁴ Where the vocally fried young jobseeker is expected to invest in fixing her voice, the resourceful vlogger is encouraged to parlay hers into cash and clout. Like the spare room listed on Airbnb or the spare time we could spend gigging for Uber or Deliveroo, the voice becomes an asset, the value of which we can calculate and realize with the help of the feedback mechanisms (likes, comments, subscriptions, metrics, and statistics) built into apps and social media platforms. In some cases it is the ability to give voice to familiar stereotypes that is valued: Daniel Smith, in his account of the role voice and accent play in the commodification of the self online, describes how YouTuber charlieissocoollike capitalized on his capacity to perform a kind of “mythic… Englishness… associated with the elite sections of British society” and consonant with the “globally recognisable notion of an ‘Englishman.’”⁶⁵ In other cases voices resonate because they complicate or challenge stereotypes; comedian Guz Khan (who was working as a teacher when his second YouTube video went viral, paving the way for a sitcom that has been praised for challenging perceptions of British Muslims) has recently been hailed as an example of how social media can still deliver on the promise of amplifying voices that went unheard under the hegemony of “old” media.⁶⁶ It is hard, however, to be unequivocally enthusiastic when YouTube has also been so effective at disseminating “false, incendiary and toxic content” determined by its algorithms to be effective at driving “engagement,” sparking concern among employees whose complaints seem to have fallen on determinedly deaf ears.⁶⁷

Moreover, as Mat Dryhurst notes in a recent talk on developments in the music industry, efforts to amplify a diverse range of distinctive voices turn out to be highly compatible with networked capitalism’s commitment to the production of novelty, the identification of new demographic niches, and the commodification of difference: “If you are an artist whose practice speaks to a unique intersection, say based on genre, identity, or personal narrative, then you are an interesting proposition to advertisers, as you are prospectively establishing new territory to sell people stuff.”⁶⁸ As Dryhurst acknowledges, while digital platforms are numbers driven, they also recognize the value of personal narratives. Here, as with calls to rectify the underrepresentation of ethnic minorities in voice recognition databases, the question of who gets to speak is complicated, if not superseded, by that of the terms on which different subjects are heard. For Dryhurst the prevalence of a superficial kind of “representation politics in the current media landscape” speaks to the utility of certain kinds of identitarian life writing when it comes to “generat[ing] value from what is ostensibly an overabundance of music or culture… if now millions of people have the tools to create good-enough-Jeff-Mills-derivative techno tracks, it only makes sense that the distinguishing logic that someone might use to opt to support producer X over producer Y would heavily focus on tangential narrative elements.”⁶⁹ Here Dryhurst echoes James, who draws attention to the particular prominence of what she calls “Look I Overcame” narratives in contemporary pop, showing how female stars in particular are required to perform modes of “resilience” that entail converting “damage” into fuel for triumph.⁷⁰

Dramatizing neoliberalism’s conviction that we are all “individually responsible for overcoming” adverse circumstances,⁷¹ James argues that these figures help to obfuscate the deep structural inequalities that continue to pervade notionally meritocratic societies, as the ability of specific women, queers, and people of color to transcend hardship, trauma, or prejudice is presented as proof of inclusivity and equality of opportunity. The ease with which the voices and biographies of members of marginalized communities can be co-opted lends more urgency to the work of scholars like Nicholas de Villiers and Tavia Nyong'o. Looking to Foucault, Barthes and Warhol, De Villiers spotlights strategies of “queer opacity” that frustrate demands for revelation.⁷² Nyong'o, meanwhile, shows how queers of color have developed modes of “dis/appearing” based on “perform[ing] both for and against the camera.”⁷³ Both demonstrate how attention to queer auto/biographical archives can yield strategies for negotiating the demand to render oneself legible online.

Of course, new technologies have always fostered new forms of vocal performance and new modes of listening. Diedrich Diederichsen argues that what we now think of as pop music (as distinct from popular music or folksong) only began to emerge in the 1950s, thanks to three technological developments: firstly, the advent of new recording technologies “especially microphones that could capture soft and weak voices,” registering “physical properties … which turned out to be easily fetishizable and were often regarded as sexy”; secondly, the proliferation of “cheap and mobile listening devices, which allowed children and teenagers to have sound systems in their own bedrooms,” facilitating a more intimate relationship with music; thirdly, the development of a range of print and broadcast media – from TV shows and record sleeves to magazines – which linked these voices to particular bodies, images, and aesthetics.⁷⁴ With these three developments pop music emerged as a realm of “sonic fetishes, sound effects [and] strange and individual voices” that came to function as “totem sounds: sounds that stand in for the affiliation with certain subcultures, urban tribes or scenes, or with a given generation.”⁷⁵

Diederichsen’s notion of totem sounds makes a sort of intuitive sense in an era of sampling and software studios. Today, many pop songs are essentially collages of fetishizable fragments, often aiming to mobilize the memories and associations carried by familiar melodies, instruments, and samples – from the “Amen break” used in countless jungle tracks and the “Woo! Yeah!” from Lynn Collins’s “Think (About It)” (1972) to the “Ha” chant so beloved of ballroom producers and the “eski click” sound featured in many Wiley tracks before being adopted by other grime producers. My Ego Media work on grime⁷⁶ provides examples of how identities are affirmed, reformed, and contested through the circulation and recontextualization of such totemic fragments. It also considers how performers seek to distinguish themselves by devising vocal totems of their own. Where Zoella has adapted her voice to YouTube, early grime MCs cultivated catchphrases and stylistic tics that enabled them to cut through the static inherent to pirate radio broadcasts – a medium even lossier than a low-bitrate Suzanne Vega MP3. In place of the white feminine warmth Vega exudes, these vocalists tended towards icy indifference or fiery belligerence, drawing on (and sometimes subverting) black masculine archetypes as they rode 140 bpm beats pieced together using programs like Fruity Loops or Logic, tools that exemplify the modularity of digital cultural production.

Providing a means of self-expression for young working-class Londoners, many of them first- or second-generation African or Caribbean migrants, grime is a product, as Joy White notes, of Gilroy’s black Atlantic.⁷⁷ Influences from American hip-hop and Jamaican soundsystem culture rub shoulders with cockney slang in grime sets, while so-called sinogrime tunes add MIDI approximations of traditional Chinese instruments to the mix. As with drill music today, however, grime was often heard as expressing criminality rather than artistry. A recent Wired piece citing critics of the Metropolitan Police’s Gangs Matrix software observes that “sharing certain YouTube videos of grime or drill music… is considered a key indicator of gang affiliation,” negatively influencing the software’s calculation of an individual’s “risk score.”⁷⁸

My article on grime⁷⁹ was an invitation to hear the genre differently, foregrounding its role in chronicling gaming’s place in the lives and identities of millennial Londoners. Scene lynchpins like Wiley, JME, D Double E, and Dizzee Rascal have all worked videogames into their music, lyrics, and personae via samples, allusions, puns, and similes, as, more recently, have grime-informed acts like the Senegalese-Kuwaiti artist Fatima al Qadiri. While console videogames are, to a large extent, still made by and for young, middle-class cisgendered men, critics like Adrienne Shaw have affirmed the importance of recognizing that games have always been enjoyed by individuals who fail to fit the demographic profile of the “typical” gamer.⁸⁰ Framing grime as an expression of videogame fandom helps to complicate this profile.

While any media text might be thought of as a stockpile of components – characters, images, sounds, phrases – there is a sense in which videogames really are little more than databases of discrete digital assets “configur[ed]” by players in concert with the hardware and software.⁸¹ This modularity means games can be easily stripped for parts, whether by grime producers interpolating totemic vocal samples or avant-garde designers of autobiographical games like Cassie McQuater, whose Black Room (2017) seeks to resignify sexualized female avatars.⁸² Of course, other forms of digital self-presentation are similarly configurative; meme culture, with its emphasis on reworking established templates to achieve a “balance between fixity and novelty,”⁸³ is founded on the ubiquity of software that enables users to easily edit, alter, rescale, and swap out elements of digital imagetexts.

In considering the role of totemic digital fragments in online identity work it is tempting to draw parallels with how “mundane objects – a safety pin, a pointed shoe, a motorcycle” assumed “a symbolic dimension” for the postwar subcultures considered in Dick Hebdige’s famous study, “becoming a form of stigmata, tokens of a self-imposed exile.”⁸⁴ As Alan Liu has argued, however, Hebdige’s ideas require renovation for the transformed cultural landscape of post-Fordism.⁸⁵ The gestures of rebellion and refusal Hebdige documents can be seen as belonging to a tradition of “artistic criticism” which bemoaned “oppression (market domination, factory discipline), the massification of society, standardisation, and pervasive commodification” while upholding “an ideal of liberation and/or of individual autonomy, singularity, and authenticity.”⁸⁶ With the advent of post-Fordism, however, “many components of artistic criticism” were integrated “into the new spirit of capitalism”;⁸⁷ flexibility, creativity, and individual autonomy became the watchwords of a new economic order founded on the disruption of established routines and hierarchies and the emergence of new forms of digital “knowledge work.”⁸⁸ For Liu, digital cool is “rebellious” primarily insofar as it resists intelligibility and categorization: characterizing cool content as “information designed to resist information,” he sees its creation (or curation) as a “paradoxical gesture by which the ethos of the unknown—of the archaically and stubbornly unknowable— struggles to stand in the midst of knowledge work.” Written in 2004, Liu’s account of cool as “an estranged, small voice—picking up riffs and styles ad hoc from whatever resource it can find—sing[ing]” amidst the vast “information architecture of networks”⁸⁹ resonates nevertheless with contemporary meme culture’s ongoing commitment to the absurd,⁹⁰ the ambiguous, the abject, and the apparently arbitrary – and, for that matter, with Dryhurst’s account of how studiously eclectic underground musicians defy generic conventions only to “establish new territory” for brands to lay claim to.⁹¹ There are, to be sure, many instances in which digital totems are used to affirm particular identities and affiliations online, not to mention a renewed tendency towards the kind of avowedly political stance-taking Liu sees as lamentably absent from early twenty-first-century youth culture.⁹² But it is also true that in many domains of online culture totemic fragments are mobilized in ways intended to frustrate attempts at categorization and interpretation. As I have argued in my reading of Nina Freeman’s autobiographical “desktop simulator” Cibele (2015),^93,94 this kind of activity reflects the character of what Milner and Phillips call “the ambivalent internet”⁹⁵ – a domain where users seek to accrue social and cultural capital (or simply to avoid being gainsaid, caught out, or held to account) by presenting themselves in ways that are intentionally cryptic or potentially ironic.

My work on grime, like much of the scholarship that has informed my Ego Media research, was informed by a conviction that pop music remains an important site for thinking about our changing relationship with the mediated voice, and about the construction and commodification of identities. As James implies, pop stars (like the Gaiety chorus girls from whom they are descended, and on whom our project Moving Past Present focused⁹⁶) have served as canaries in the coal mine of networked self-presentation, pioneering the mutation of the “private person” into the multiply mediated “corporate person.”⁹⁷ But pop music has also ceded ground to videogames, imageboards, vlogs, and streams as a vehicle for ideas, aesthetics, and identifications, and web users are increasingly looking to other media and genres to perform functions that recorded music used to.

Take, for example, Miriama Young’s account of music as a means of creating a kind of headphone-bound “bubble space” where “one body collapses into another”; Young singles out Bjork’s 2001 Vespertine LP as an example of bubble sonics, noting that “bodily indicators such as breath and vocal aberration are deliberately included, sometimes emphasised” in songs that incorporate “close microphone recordings of the tiny sounds that emanate from the vocal tract” and are accompanied by “timbral sizzling and glitch-beats” that “emulate the frequencies and textures of saliva.”⁹⁸ In doing so she comes uncannily close to a description of the tactics used by YouTube “ASMRtists’ to elicit the mysterious tingling sensation known autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR), on which one strand of my Ego Media research has focused.⁹⁹ Those who experience ASMR find these tingles, which spread in waves from the scalp, down the spine, and throughout the body, profoundly pleasurable and relaxing. Many use ASMRtists’ videos as a means of managing conditions ranging from insomnia, stress, and anxiety to migraine and depression. Whispered speech, lip smacking, mastication, and other mouth sounds are all held to be potent triggers by online ASMR communities.

Videos designed to induce ASMR represent a particularly striking instance of what Mack Hagood identifies as a wider cultural tendency to use “Orphic media” – from noise-canceling headphones to white noise generators – as means of motivating ourselves, relaxing, concentrating, or getting to sleep.¹⁰⁰ Like Orpheus, who tunes out the song of the sirens with music of his own, Orphic media fight fire with fire, using the same platforms and devices that make us feel beset, deafened, and overconnected to provide solace and impetus. Where Bjork’s experiments in mediated intimacy, like Suzanne Vega’s performances of hyperfeminine warmth, came via the vehicle of the verse-chorus pop record, ASMR culture dispenses with such forms, structures, and modes of dissemination. It also shifts the context of reception from aesthetic appreciation to something more medicalized (reflecting, in so doing, the same preoccupation with electronically monitoring and modulating bodily states witnessed in my Ego Media compatriot Rachael Kent’s work on the use of self-tracking technologies in health and fitness contexts).

Of course, it is not unusual to see music consumption in similar terms (indeed, the music streaming service Spotify has been aggressively courting advertisers by presenting itself as uniquely positioned to offer “troves of data related to our emotional states, moods, and feelings” ¹⁰¹). There is, nevertheless, something arresting about the ASMR community’s use of the word trigger – a term more often associated with traumatic flashbacks or allergic reactions – to describe the use of media to achieve a desired physiological state. As we explored in our Black Boxed Subjects panel at the DH 2015 Global Digital Humanities conference, there are parallels here with Rebecca Roach’s work on understandings of epilepsy and their role in the evolution of cybernetics (on the King's College, London website); in ASMR discourse as in certain framings of epilepsy, there is a tendency to reduce the individual to a kind of input-output device, akin to the “black box” posited in the famous cybernetic thought experiment.¹⁰² ASMR videos are not cast as acts of meaningful expression but as audiovisual stimuli instrumentalized to elicit a particular response. Videogames have been understood in similar terms by many critics, who hold that beyond any stories games might aspire to tell – and beyond, even, the ludic pleasures of devising and implementing effective gameplay strategies – digital gaming’s appeal is rooted in essentially sensuous, more or less meaningless experiences of “immersion” and “flow.”¹⁰³

If many academics have turned to affect theory to understand these kinds of relationships with media, ASMRtists and their audiences have evolved their own vocabulary for discussing them. As part of my research on ASMR I produced a podcast¹⁰⁴ with UK ASMRtists Emma (aka WhispersRed) and Ian (aka Muted Vocal). At one stage I asked them why they thought fans found their voices so affecting and how this has affected their feelings about those voices. For Emma – who as a “naturally quiet” child was always being told to “speak up,” and who describes herself as having “a funny accent... because I’ve lived in two different places for equal amounts of time” – success as an ASMRtist has been validating, proof that a voice she has always felt self-conscious about has the capacity to “connect personally with someone.” Hers is a rather Rousseauvian spin on the form; her videos often draw on childhood memories and are underpinned by a belief in the voice as vehicle for authentic interpersonal connection. For Ian, by contrast, ASMRtistry is about performance; he has cultivated a persona informed by the cut-glass campiness of Hammer Horror icons like Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, and his videos often play with gothic tropes, blurring the line between the spine-tingling and the scalp-tingling. But where Ian foregrounds playful pretense and Emma authenticity and honesty, both stress the amount of work that goes into creating ASMR videos. While for many this work goes largely unremunerated, the most successful ASMRtists are amply compensated. In a recent Wired piece Amelia Tait interviews a teenage ASMRtist who speaks of having “spent th[e] summer in her bedroom filming 50 custom-made ASMR videos. She would receive daily email requests for bespoke videos, shoot the footage, receive money over PayPal (ten minutes cost $50, whereas for $30 (about £23) you’d get a five minute clip) and upload the video to her YouTube channel.”¹⁰⁵ At least some of the money such performers make will be invested in specialist equipment like green screens, 4K cameras, and, perhaps most importantly, binaural microphones, all held to increase a video’s tingle-generating potential. While ASMR videos often depict “concentrated acts of attentive altruism,”¹⁰⁶ then, this altruism is by no means incompatible with trying to turn a profit.

Like postwar pop music as described by Diedrichsen, grime music and ASMR videos emerged from particular constellations of media that enabled particular kinds of voices to be heard, constellations that shaped (without determining) the development of these forms. By mapping them we can gain insights into how media circulate and how cultural agency is differentially distributed across networks of human and nonhuman actors that now include algorithms and smart machines. As a sound and a scene, grime still bears the stamp of the expressive resources available to its first wave: keyboards and software studios, FM transmitters and vinyl, videogame consoles and Nokia 3310s. At the same time, it has adapted nimbly to a universe of iPhones, YouTube, and Instagram. As Joy White writes, grime’s enthusiastic adoption of social media was in part a pragmatic response to the heavy-handed and discriminatory policing of urban music scenes; in the 2000s grime events were repeatedly “cancelled or shut down… due to a perceived threat of trouble” to the point where, essentially, “grime could not be performed live.”¹⁰⁷ This foreclosure of offline opportunities to build audiences, in combination with demands from major record labels to temper the genre’s stylistic idiosyncracies, provided a strong impetus to explore digital platforms. For White, grime both gives voice to and has helped to address “the problem of the NEET” (individuals not in education, employment, or training) forming part of an “urban music economy” that has historically offered opportunities to young people whose employment prospects are otherwise bleak.¹⁰⁸ As members of professions that used to be comparatively well-insulated from economic shocks are encouraged to hustle harder and spend more time promoting themselves online, they find themselves playing catch up with erstwhile NEETs like White’s interviewees, who never had the luxury of imagining the system would look out for them.

The crystallization of a culture and a language of ASMR, meanwhile, is inextricable from the rise of social media, video streaming platforms, predictive search results, and algorithmic curation software. While ASMR bloggers and vloggers offer accounts of the tingles that long predate the internet, ASMR as we now know it is a consequence of the explosive proliferation of digital recording devices and of platforms for hosting audio and video. YouTube alone constitutes a dizzyingly vast database of ordinary people talking (and whispering and shouting and singing) about all kinds of things, in videos that even ten years ago would never have been broadcast, released, or recorded and which often defy traditional formal and generic categories. The platform allows users to upload (more or less) whatever and for viewers to watch it (more or less) whenever and wherever. During the period I was researching the subreddit r/asmr¹⁰⁹ (a key site for the exchange of trigger videos) users posted YouTube links to cricket commentary, white noise, quantum physics lectures, interviews with Japanese fashion designers, readings of modernist poetry, and Korean baristas giving coffee-making advice. As this selection suggests, contributors to the board dispensed with conventional notions of genre in pursuit of recordings with a particular acoustic texture, affective tenor, or sense of vocal “grain.”¹¹⁰ It was from this heterogeneous array of materials that ASMRtists derived the trigger techniques used in their videos.

ASMR culture’s disregard for the ostensible content and function of the videos it shares mirrors YouTube’s own content-agnostic, engagement-first attitude – the same attitude that has allowed bigotry, hate speech, and conspiracy theories (all of which prove to be highly “engaging”) to thrive on the platform. Compared with stories of right-wing radicalization, the emergence of ASMR culture offers a relatively benign example of how online archives and the systems designed to help users navigate them can bring people together. It is worth noting, though, that in its desire to understand the tingles, ASMR culture has often looked to neuroscience and evolutionary psychology to ground theories that can be troublingly reductive and essentializing. In this respect it is not as remote as we might wish from the beliefs of online reactionary movements who invoke “race realist” pseudoscience and appeals to biological “common sense” to legitimize racism and xenophobia, antifeminism, and transphobia and homophobia.

I have been particularly interested in how individuals seek to weave experiences of ASMR, and of digital gameplay, into autobiographical narratives. Neither seems especially promising as subject matter; for where autobiography tends to posit an active, reflective individual whose character and psyche are shaped by events that merit narrative elaboration and hermeneutic elucidation, these media speak to the currency of very different models of subjectivity. ASMR trigger videos, like flow-inducing games, are frequently seen as addressing subjects on a preconscious level. Accounts of these media often focus on the phylogenetic plane of human susceptibilities and capacities, a realm below or beyond that of specific individuals’ choices, traits, or opinions. In so doing they reflect a wider tendency, within contemporary culture, to look to biology to account for tendencies and behaviors that might once have been explained biographically, socioculturally, or psychologically. And yet people remain keen to integrate gaming and ASMR into their identities and to develop forms of life writing adequate to these experiences. My research has looked at a number of “ludobiographical” texts that address gaming’s role in particular subject’s lives.^111,112 It has also considered the conflicting impulses at work in what I call “ASMR autobiographies” (online narratives in which individuals relate their personal experiences of ASMR and their first encounters with networked ASMR communities).¹¹³ In many ways these texts suggest an ongoing desire to narrate the self according to familiar templates. In other ways, though, they betray a suspicion of the models of subjectivity traditionally central to the autobiographical enterprise.

ASMR autobiographies also provide a useful index of the extent to which, in our post-Google “culture of search,” we have come to “incorporate ‘the searcher’ as a component of personal identity.”¹¹⁴ Journalist Ryan Dombal’s 2016 profile of musician James Hinton, aka The Range, provides another instructive instance of this tendency. If we are used to music journalists penning breathlessly hyperbolic accounts of guitar solos or seismic drops, it still feels unusual to see a musician portrayed as a virtuoso searcher, preternaturally skilled (or so Dombal implies) at combing YouTube for vocal samples. There is something unintentionally bathetic about the way that Dombal attempts to wring intrigue and drama from the spectacle of Hinton “typ[ing] in a few of his go-to search terms (which he politely asks me to keep secret) and… toying around with the site’s filters and algorithms in order to find the unvarnished humanity he’s looking for… something… instinctual and empathetic.”¹¹⁵

Dombal offers ammunition here for Dryhurst’s argument that there is increasing pressure to provide novel conceptual and/or auto/biographical scaffolding for cultural products that are, in their own right, generic and derivative. Ultimately his feature is noteworthy less for how it describes Hinton’s music – a modest contribution to the illustrious tradition of dance music “vocal science”¹¹⁶ – than for its framing of YouTube. The feature portrays Hinton as plumbing the obscurer reaches of Google’s servers to find raw, relatable, and impassioned expressions of everyday angst, hope, and desire, implying that this is where all of the authenticity missing from mainstream culture can be found, provided we are able to bypass the algorithmic gatekeepers attempting to drive us to slicker content. While Dombal does ask whether Hinton “worr[ies] about exploiting these vocalists’ emotions,” he also assures readers that Hinton has “reach[ed] out to the people he was sampling in an effort to shine a light on their talents, get their blessing, and offer a stake in the song’s publishing royalties.” Ultimately Hinton’s music becomes the vehicle for a decidedly upbeat vision of networked vocality. Recounting how moved Hinton is by the words of a thirteen-year-old London rapper mourning a friend he lost in 2009, the same year Hinton’s mother died, Dombal suggests how, by giving voice to their personal experiences, web users can also articulate shared emotions and wider concerns. YouTube is presented as a means of forging connections, allowing the grief expressed by a black UK teenager to resonate with a white, Pennsylvania-born “former theoretical physics student,” and laying the groundwork for an asynchronous, mutually advantageous act of collaborative composition.

Of course, for every feel-good story of postracial empathy and ethical sampling there is another, equally instructive instance of borrowed voices fomenting antagonism and sparking charges of hypocrisy, appropriation, plagiarism, and/or inauthenticity. Some fans of Terre Thaemlitz, a genderfluid DJ, producer, and critical theorist whose records are informed by “my love of house music as a non-individualist, sample based medium,” and who has “always voiced active criticism of notions of authorship, authenticity, creativity, etc.,” ¹¹⁷ were surprised when Thaemlitz issued takedown notices to YouTubers sharing his music. This act seemed inconsistent with her¹¹⁸ track record of “defend[ing] the fair use of sampling as a means of cultural commentary” and “asking repeatedly why audio producers are not free to use samples as ‘audio footnotes’ in the same way writers are free to reference texts by other writers with footnotes.”¹¹⁹ Thaemlitz has lamented the fact that “in the case of culturally critical, satirical, feminist, transgender or sexual-related works it is common practice for corporate rights holders to refuse clearance,” essentially barring artists from “possess[ing] and react[ing] to the culture we live, breath [sic] and ultimately finance.”¹²⁰ As he also argues, however, the ability of copyright holders to have infringing content removed from online platforms is one of the few mechanisms available to artists seeking to resist the “eradication of… specificity of context and audience that occurs when information is shared through populist models of making all information available to everyone.”¹²¹ Here aesthetic preferences overlap with safety concerns: echoing Galloway, de Villiers, and Nyong'o, Thaemlitz questions the equation of “liberation” with “speaking up”¹²², arguing that the imperative to digitally share (a key tenet of what Clare Birchall calls the logic of “shareveillance”¹²³) and the tendency to assume that it is the “burden of the oppressed to make themselves heard” obfuscate what Thaemlitz sees as the “continued need for secrecy, closets, invisibility and silence as means of self-defence.”¹²⁴ For this reason she expresses exasperation with the way that platforms like YouTube “try to downplay their responsibility in content removal by replacing removed videos with statements like ‘This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Terre Thaemlitz’” – a framing that absolves the platform of responsibility while exposing artists to “angry emails” from “pissed off fans” – and perhaps worse.¹²⁵

Wu Tang Clan rapper Ghostface Killah’s YouTube video calling out fellow MC Action Bronson¹²⁶ embodies a different approach to controlling the circulation of voices but also poses questions about attribution, appropriation, identification, and identity. In a May 2015 interview, Ghostface confessed that he had, in the past, mistaken Bronson’s voice for his own, confiding “I thought he was me one day… I’m asking myself when the fuck I do that verse?… they pulled it up on the YouTube.” Watching Bronson, Ghostface asks himself a question: is that “just the tone of [his] voice” or is he “a great actor”? And “if that’s his voice what the fuck you supposed to do?”¹²⁷ By September, however, his attitude had soured, thanks to a TV appearance in which Bronson had brushed off comparisons with Ghostface and made slighting comments about his recent work.

Ghostface’s response video was uploaded soon after and saw him describing how, having initially assumed “that God” had simply given Bronson “the same tone,” he eventually came to the conclusion that Bronson was a “fake” and a “fraud,” consciously imitating him.¹²⁸ This vacillation reflects that fact that how we sound – and who we sound like – is neither totally determined by what “God” gave us, nor totally under our control, hovering, in Ricoeur’s terms, between the realms of the “voluntary” and the “involuntary,”¹²⁹ It also highlights the voice’s role in mediating between personal and collective identities. Ghostface insists that the feud isn’t “a black and white thing,” framing it instead as a dispute between two New York rappers (one of whom happens, as a man of Jewish-Albanian descent, to qualify as “white” by contemporary standards). Nevertheless, the video invites a consideration of how, by “disturb[ing] th[e] traffic between the sonic and the visual,” audio recordings “deny[] the audience… any easy way to determine the performer’s racial identity.”¹³⁰

The conceit of a “white” voice issuing from a “black” throat (or vice versa) has been used to powerful effect in recent films like BlacKkKlansman (Lee, 2018), Sorry to Bother You (Riley, 2018) and Get Out (Peele, 2017), all of which speak to the fraught racial politics of the post-Obama, post-Ferguson US. But these films also show that racial “transvocalization”¹³¹ is never simply “a black and white thing,” with Riley, in particular, taking pains to look beyond black/white binaries and show that “race” (which is, after all, an “invented construct”¹³²) cannot be disentangled from factors like age, gender, geography, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status. This entanglement, in fact, underwrites the strategies Ghostface deploys in his video, strategies designed to affirm his status as a paragon of the “combative, and usually masculine, form of US blackness” with which hip-hop has become synonymous while fixing Bronson in the role of impostor.¹³³ While it’s not rapped, his monologue is delivered over the 1972 track “Be for Real” by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes and is punctuated by moments where Ghostface pauses to let the record speak for him, entreating us/Bronson to “listen” as Teddy Pendergrass pleads “be for real.” The original song sees Pendergrass chastising a woman for her bougified pretensions, a woman portrayed as having distanced herself from the social class from which she comes and, implicitly, the ethnic group to which she belongs. By refunctioning its refrain as a warning to a white male “fraud,” Ghostface feminizes Bronson, playing on misogynistic tropes of female vanity and artifice while asserting his own seniority, heteromasculinity, and ghetto authenticity.

Insofar as he is calling out inconsistency and inauthenticity, one might see Ghostface as echoing Mark Zuckerbeg’s notorious assertion that everyone has “one identity” and that presenting a different “image” to different audiences is dishonest.¹³⁴ Ghostface accuses Bronson of saying one thing on TV and another over the phone, criticizing him for posting and then deleting apologetic tweets. But he also borrows the Blue Notes track to do so, a track in which Pendergrass cites his mother (“She used to say, ‘Son, chances go ’round’”) and mimics the woman he is taking to task, modulating into a breathier falsetto to play her. In short, Ghostface’s apparently unambiguous argument for univocality is shot through with heteroglossia. Indeed, the video might be seen as illustrating Max Saunders’s argument that while more relational forms of life writing have been seen as welcome alternatives to texts invested in “perpetuating the myth of the atomistic individual,” we should be careful not to “sentimentalise” relationality, acknowledging that it can be “conflictual” and that gestures of affiliation and identification often entail “exclusion and disrelation” too – as when Ghosftace aligns himself with Pendergrass (who, of course, has no say in the matter) in order to distance himself from Bronson.¹³⁵

Moreover (and as one smart aleck commentator on the site Genius.com noted), if we assume that Ghostface is being “for real” when he threatens to have Bronson disappeared, then he’s essentially incriminating himself. Such an assumption would, however, be unwarranted; as Nasim Balestrini, argues, while hip-hop and life writing share a preoccupation with “truth, sincerity, resemblance, and referentiality,” obsessing about in/authenticity is ultimately counterintuitive.¹³⁶ In his discussion of Ghostface’s voice Steven Shaviro similarly opts to sidestep “debates about authenticity and ‘realness’ in hip-hop,” instead framing his subject as “an expressionist” – a category which “cut[s] across the opposition between reality and fantasy.”¹³⁷

Ghostface the expressionist is arguably ill-served by platforms like Genius. Describing itself as a “collection of… crowdsourced musical knowledge,” Genius hosts transcriptions and discussions of song lyrics. Turning voice into annotated text, it privileges verbal content and semantic meaning over feeling and tone. Eric Harvey locates the site (initially called RapGenius) within a long tradition of “translating” black discourse and culture for white audiences. For him, what differentiated Genius from the many online lyrics repositories that preceded it was its embrace of a form of “Web 2.0 neoliberalism” that entailed “getting music fans to provide free labor that is simultaneously pleasurable (for fans) and profitable (for the site’s owners, and, indirectly, Google).”¹³⁸ In return for their transcriptions, criticism, commentary, exegesis, and life writing, Genius contributors are awarded “IQ points” that can be used to unlock perks. Gamifying the process of creating user-generated content, Genius also gamed Google by giving each annotation its own page, pushing the site up the search result rankings. While the platform has grown to encompass other musical genres – and indeed canonical poetry and literature - Harvey asserts that it is rooted in the assumption that nonwhite speech needs to be monitored and decrypted, the same assumption that underwrites inmate voiceprinting schemes and the framing of drill fandom as an indicator of criminality.

Balestrini suggests that instead of scouring rap lyrics for proof of “authenticity” we should look instead at how rappers mobilize a diverse array of verbal, visual, and sonic materials to further their “intermedial… myth-making” projects.¹³⁹ Shaviro, meanwhile, talks about how Ghostface’s voice, with its distinctive (though, as Bronson proves, hardly inimitable) “tones and inflections” operates in dialogue with samples that, for him, represent “the voice’s context, the otherness that it must confront, the field of forces in which [the voice] must be located, and the memory traces that it reactivates, and to which it responds.”¹⁴⁰ Acknowledging that autobiography is rife with role-play and that individual voices are shot through with otherness, these approaches prove equally illuminating when it comes to forms of online self-presentation – especially, as my next essay addresses, when it comes to understanding the functions of avatars in online identity work.