The Listener’s Digital Shadow

Digital platforms now routinely construct annual retrospectives—Spotify Wrapped, Audible Stats, and their equivalents on Chinese platforms like Ximalaya—that claim to reveal “who you truly are” through data. Existing scholarship has largely theorized this algorithmic self-narration through the lens of semantic traces: highlights, annotations, and content preferences that express intellectual judgments. This paper argues that such frameworks overlook a distinct and increasingly prevalent mode of self-formation grounded in auditory behavior. We introduce the concept of “prosodic engagement traces” (hereinafter “traces”)—digital footprints capturing how users pace, replay, skip, and modulate their listening tempo—as a category fundamentally different from semantic traces. Unlike semantic traces, which carry propositional content about what a user thinks, prosodic engagement traces register the bodily, rhythmic, and affective texture of how a user listens. Drawing on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics of play, Paul Ricœur’s theory of narrative identity, Couper-Kuhlen and Wennerstrom’s conversation-analytic work on prosody, we propose a theoretical framework in which these traces facilitate a distinctive process of self-formation: “resonant recognition”. This is a non-narrative, aesthetic mode of self-encounter wherein the listener recognizes herself not through coherent life stories but through the felt familiarity of her own listening rhythms. Crucially, this process unfolds as “reflection without an other”: the algorithmic narration bypasses the dialogical encounter central to Gadamerian hermeneutics while simultaneously compressing the detour through textual distanciation that Ricœur deemed necessary for self-understanding. The empirical portion of the study operationalizes this framework through a hermeneutic analysis of platform-generated listening narratives, triangulated with a three-stage coding of 327 user-generated social media responses (from Weibo and Xiaohongshu) to their own listening retrospectives. Of these, six posts were selected for intensive hermeneutic analysis based on their theoretical richness; the remainder supported the broader coding framework. Findings reveal a distinct discursive pattern through which users articulate an “aesthetic self”—a self recognized in the grain of the voice, the rhythm of pausing, and the texture of tempo, rather than in the content of words. The paper concludes by theorizing how prosodic engagement traces reconfigure the hermeneutic circle under algorithmic conditions and proposes the cultivation of a “critical listening literacy” as a response to this emergent mode of digital subjectivation.