Project Summary:

The project explores how the act of listening – as a fundamental human capacity – is changing in the context of the contemporary digital environment and how these changes affect the possibility of understanding speech and meaning. Its point of departure is philosophical, with an emphasis on phenomenology, hermeneutics and critical theory, but the project also extends into the fields of digital media, philosophy of language, artistic practice, literary theory and the ethics of communication. At the centre of the project is the question of intelligibility: what do “intelligibility” and “communicativeness” mean in digital spaces in which speech is ubiquitous yet often increasingly difficult to understand due to fragmented attention, algorithmic content selection and the prevalence of the visual over the auditory. By combining phenomenological description, hermeneutic interpretation and critical analysis of contemporary digital practices, the project will seek to develop a concept of the intelligibility of digital reality and offer philosophical tools for understanding and critiquing the ways in which we listen, interpret and communicate today. In this respect, over four years of research, the project will encompass theoretical elaboration, the analysis of specific case studies (TikTok, podcasts, algorithmic curation, etc.), and will culminate in a synthesis presented through scholarly publications, a monograph and public events. In doing so, it will contribute to the development of contemporary media criticism, digital humanities and an ethics of listening in a technologically mediated society.

Project Objective:

The objective of the project is to develop a philosophically grounded and interdisciplinarily applicable approach to the phenomenon of listening as a process of understanding, and to analyse how contemporary digital contexts affect the possibility of intelligibility of speech and meaning.

In this regard, the project particularly seeks to:

a) investigate the phenomenon of listening phenomenologically and hermeneutically as an existential and communicative act that precedes and shapes understanding;
b) critically analyse the degradation and regression of listening in the context of digital media, algorithmic mediation and the fragmentation of attention;
c) establish the theoretical concept of the digitalisation of intelligibility as a new category for analysing the relationship between speech, voice and understanding in the digital sphere;
d) philosophically conceptualise and develop a methodology of emancipated listening in the context of technologically shaped everyday life.

The objective of the project is therefore not only to understand how we listen, but also under what conditions we can truly understand others in a digital world in which speech, presence and attention have become unstable, automated and fragmentarily interrupted.