On the night of July 15–16, 2006, Lebanese avant-jazz trumpeter and visual artist Mazen Kerbaj set up his recording equipment on the balcony of his Beirut apartment. Once the mics were set up and he had checked sound levels, he hit record. He then improvised on his trumpet to the sight and sounds of bombs falling from Israeli fighter jets. Over the thirty-three days of the 2006 Israeli War, Kerbaj recorded over nine hours of improvisation with the bombs. On July 16, 2006 an unedited excerpt from Kerbaj's first night on the balcony appeared in the sidebar of his blog (http://mazenkerblog.blogspot.com/). Entitled ‘Starry Night,’ this minimalistic improvised piece remains available on the blog's sidebar.

Digital media has upped the ante for sound in culture and, by extension, the possibilities for the performance of listening. The novel was the primary cultural genre through which the French Revolution, the War of 1812, and the many shorter revolutions over the course of the tumultuous nineteenth century was documented, processed, and understood. The novel served as a response to revolution that was literary, aesthetic, and/or philosophical, rather than violent. And if the novel was the genre of nineteenth-century revolution, then digital media is the genre of twenty-first-century conflict. With digital works, however, there is more flexibility in terms of artistic media, as well as higher speed and lower cost of production and distribution. The higher speed and lower cost of digital media transmission are of particular interest in considering how blogs issue a call to listen, and are among the reasons why Kerbaj's ‘Starry Night’ and related blog posts are the focus of the conclusion for this work. Kerbaj's 2006 performance and posts presaged the use of social media in the Arab Spring and the role of drones, digital media, and leaks of confidential information and correspondence in the Syrian Civil War, Daesh (the Islamic State), and terrorist attacks around the world. Digital discourse has changed so much about our cultures and societies, and the call to listen in postcolonial Francophone culture is no exception: as I will explain, it was digital discourse that led to Kerbaj not only becoming an important figure in French culture, but also becoming an artist who expresses himself in French, by choice—as a non-native speaker of French.