ISP Blogpost — Journal #4
[Substitute the word ‘Mozart’ for the word ‘Internet’]
“ I submit that Mozart’s main topic is not, as Cohen believed, love. It is the metaphysical mystery of the existence of a human universe of pure sociality, the exploration of the manifold forms in which man meets his fellow-man and acquires knowledge of him. The encounter of man with man within the human world is Mozart’s main concern. This explains the perfect humanity of his art.”
(Schutz, 1964: 199) Collected Papers
In this weeks journal I will be discussing approaches to virtual identity extending from a cultural and sociological studies background. As I have highlighted in previous journals, I believe ethno/musicology could learn quite a bit from ground made already in other disciplines. This also goes hand-in-hand with an issue I felt while reading Music in Technoculture of the date of publication. The internet is constantly moving and being forged at a rapid pace, yet some authors write as though the social makeup of their research will remain that way for long periods to come. In this week’s journal, I am looking towards the future. For this reason, this week I read works from sociology published since 2000 whom discuss approaches to culture on the internet.
In the 2004 essay Consumers or Citizens? The Online Community Debate by Andrew Feenberg and Maria Bakardjieva, the authors discuss the interesting distinction between a consumption and community model for the internet. The consumption model dictates searching and retrieving information and is mostly caught up in commercial infrastructure (and is the primary usage of the internet) while the community model deals with communication, web-affected relationships, shared values, norms, meaning, history and identity.
In Virtual togetherness: an everyday-life perspective, Bakardjieva makes the argument that from the multifarious practices of the internet, community may not the best way to think about ‘virtual togetherness’. Also, that there exists a false dichotomy between virtual and real life community anyway, as real life communities are virtual too being mediated and imagined. With Feenberg in Consumers or Citizens she discusses that the internet is an “unfinished and flexible technology far from stabilisation and maturity” which is often dictated by human agency, so the time is nigh to start planning and projecting the future usage and makeup of the virtual world. A key point, the authors argue, is drawn from Feenberg’s idea of ‘democratic rationalization’ — which is an attempt to make the internet a democratic place in search for this ‘virtual togetherness’ closely associated with the community model. This relates to an idea I am interested in, of ‘interpretive flexibility’ in which the users can purpose and nature their intentions online, exercising agency within deterministic technical constraints. Obviously this leaves a lot of opportunities especially in music and the music industry online but importantly, Feenberg argues, it is able to “challenge harmful consequences, undemocratic power structures, and barriers to communication rooted in technological design”.
The 2003 case-study in Virtual togetherness deals with 21 domestic internet users in Vancouver, with an attempt to explore “into the experiences and motivations that lead Internet users either to get involved or to stay away from forms of virtual togetherness”. What was found, was that users have a “variety of situational motivations, needs and ideologies” which generate a rich repertory of use genres, each needing to be considered and evaluated from an academic standpoint. In other words, people use their own agency to dictate a personal experience on one end, by connecting to social worlds that relate to their particular views and experiences. From here, Bakardjieva writes that the consumption/community dichotomy “blinds commentators to the possibility of new, unexpected, unimaginable and yet humanist and empowering variations of technological practice to emerge”. For this reason we should focus on the “task of discerning, recognising and articulating the empowering aspects of the technology as they arise out of the everyday lives of real people in particular situations”.
In the case of my research, this was a refreshing idea. But I also think that alongside trying to define where we are conceptually interacting on the internet, that we should now try to ‘mature’ the technology and shape it for better usage in the future. There is a reason I argue for this in particular. This week I have read a few essays from 200-level students discussing music in their everyday life and in the overwhelming majority music was technologically mediated or downloaded primarily through the internet. Not even this, but the idea of ‘music’ was almost interchangeable with the music file itself (eg. an MP3). I thought this was very interesting, although perhaps problematic, helping to stem the disposable nature of much popular music, with global trends moving at phenomenally rapid paces. I believe the way we access music now on the internet goes hand-in-hand with its commodification and interpretation in a public sphere, with music losing some of its ephemeral power being considered as a file, to be used with a given purpose at any moment.
The 2015 Routledge Reader on the Sociology of Music edited John Sheperd & Kyle Devine states that since the 1990s the socio-cultural significance of music has increasingly become inseparable from discussions of the internet, and has become perhaps the primary medium for music in the 21st Century. It has the capacity to allow new forms of fan engagement with “and indeed a sense of ownership over” music and artists. This gives fans a new role adding a dimension of interaction between the fans and the music industry.
In conclusion, the consumption model, is argued to be plausible model for the internet because of the ‘structural realities for world we live in’ but has contributed to how the internet is setup as an information disseminator or ‘information highway’. This has meant that music in this technology and in it’s digital element is being conceptually more likened to information, rather than music itself. This contributes to the commodification of music and music trends in popular music. Yet human agency is given a new life on the internet alongside music, which offers a new role to fans being involved in the social process through social networks connected to artists and fans online. This has moved the fan from being a consumer to a prosumer — a co-producer of the musical artifact. But as Andrew Feenberg and Maria Bakardjieva write, the internet is still a technology yet to fully mature. And paying attention to the ways we can dictate a more ‘democratic rationalization’ of the internet may be in everyone’s best interest. However what the future holds I do not know.
