Abstract

In a technological culture marked by ubiquitous media, consumers increasingly seek tools to help them navigate relentless and often overwhelming media flows. One such tool is the 'sleep podcast' genre, a form of media that paradoxically facilitates disengagement to induce sleep. It is a 'non-empty' media format that relies on the spoken word and informational content to ultimately disconnect the listener, unlike other forms of ‘orphic media’ (Hagood) like white noise generators and ambient music that function principally on a psychoacoustic level. A close analysis of the sleep podcast and its technological infrastructure reveals the growing phenomenon of leveraging information as a form of background noise for affective remediation. In a media landscape where ‘engagement’ is the principal metric of success, the sleep podcast stands apart: both as a valuable media prophylactic against the potential harms of ‘the attention economy’, and as a final frontier in attention monetization.