Week 8: The genre of the hold

What you are given during a wait, treated as authored material with a history, a genre and an economics behind it.

20 April 2027

Somebody wrote the message you hear on hold. Somebody licensed the music under it, chose its tempo, and decided how often the loop reminds you that your call is important. None of that is incidental and all of it is purchasable.

The lecture reads the hold as a composed object. Sterne is the model for that reading: he treats programmed music in a shopping mall as part of the building rather than as decoration in it, and the same move works on a phone queue.