"When you’re in poverty you can’t control the noise around you”: Precariously-Housed Youth and Orphic Media

Whereas Mark Fisher claims that sonic media technologies result in a “retreat into private Oedipod consumer bliss” (2009:24), in this paper I examine the use of what Mack Hagood (2019) calls orphic media by precariously-housed youth in Edmonton as sonic self-atomization in response to externally imposed structural inequalities. The youth interviewed for this project sleep in overcrowded housing, shelters, encampments, etc. and have complex entanglements with their sonic surroundings. I contend that the agentic attempts of precariously housed youth to mediate these sounds with orphic media must be interrogated by a Spinozist approach that addresses both the ability to affect and be affected.