For the last 20 years, Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett have been trying to figure out how to create socially responsible audio in a media industry that increasingly revolves around capturing and monetizing attention. In conjunction with their live show, Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett will give a talk about producing and consuming media in the contemporary attention economy. They will discuss how their unorthodox approach to sound has allowed them to create intellectually-rigorous and impactful media in an age of distraction. This talk is based in part on their paper published by the Cambridge University Press.
Chris Hoff began his career as an audio engineer for public radio, and Sam Harnett was a labor and technology reporter. They have worked in public media for 20 years, contributed to national programs, won various awards, and in 2020 produced NPR’s most listened to story of the year. They came to realize everything they were making was starting to sound exactly the same… and felt like it had the same intent: to capture and capitalize on your attention. They wrote about this phenomenon in an academic paper titled “The Pabulum of Public Radio and Podcasting: Why It Is Bad and How Academia Can Help,” did a residency at Cornell University, created a podcast that broke conventions, and made another about humanities research. They then turned those programs into a series of live shows on topics ranging from birds to bodies, from time to transposition.
