Ethnography project -- Fieldnotes #1

In beginning my research, I've drafted a survey for iPod users to determine the effect of iPod technology on personal identity and music. Though the survey is still in draft form, many sample questions are listed below. My plan is to collect at least 100 surveys through the month of March in order to augment qualitative personal interviews with quantitative statistical data. (These questions are currently an outline; each will be redrafted, ordered, and include multiple choice options to choose from.)

• How long have you owned an iPod? (How many have you owned?)
• What model(s) iPod do you have?
• When do you listen to your iPod the most? (During what activities?)
• How often do you use the "Shuffle" mode? (For what purpose?)
• How often do you use Podcasts? (For what purpose?)
• How often do you create your own playlist? (For what purpose?)
• How many genres of music do you have on your iPod?
  
• Which genres of music do you listen to on a regular basis? (Which do you listen to the most?)
• Do you download music? (Legally? Illegally?)
• From what source(s) do you get the majority of your music?
• Do you purchase CDs, vinyl records, cassettes, or other "analog" media?
• Do you listen to the radio? (AM? FM? XM? Pandora, etc?)

In addition to the quantitative survey questions, I will also be interviewing select participants with the following qualitative questions:

• How does having an iPod affect how you listen to music?
• How reliant are you on your iPod for music consumption?
• How would you envision your life without an iPod?
• Do you identify with any musical subculture? (i.e. punk, goth, indie, etc.)
• Does your iPod reflect that identity in its contents?
• If someone were to look at your iPod, do you think they would get a sense of your musical tastes?
• Do you share your iPod? Do you show it to other people? Do you ever trade iPods?
• Are you ever embarrassed by the music on your iPod? Do you believe in "guilty pleasure" music"? Do you find yourself having music on your iPod for which you would not buy the record in a store?

Beyond drafting these survey questions, I've also started to explore the current research on iPods, downloading technology, and personal music identity. Among other articles, I chose two chapters of Steven Levy's book "The Perfect Thing: how the iPod shuffles commerce, culture and coolness. A brief summary follows.

“Download”
The story begins in 1988. Though Sony dominated music with the Walkman, German computer programmers invented the MP3, unknowing of its implications. In 1997, WinAmp is the first “digital jukebox.” The labels freak out, starting suing (for the first time), and develop as Levy puts it “a world-class fear of change.” [p138]

Contrasting MP3.com’s earlier fate, Levy discusses Napster’s inception, its consequent lawsuits, and subsequent knockoffs. With these knockoffs, Levy observes an overlooked distinction: “Napster had directed its users to songs on other users’ computer by means of a central database under its control; this was the smoking gun that made the service legally culpable… [the software of newcomers] did not have a central database. Their software set up self-sustaining file-sharing networks that lived on their own in cyberspace, like those giant fungi that cover thousands of acres in the northwest.” [p144]

Levy points out both the ignorance and the hypocrisy of the recording industry. Ignorantly, one record exec notably compared downloading to car theft—Levy notes that car-theft is zero-sum and downloading is infinite-sum. Hypocritically, the industry made ethical claims while “their history was an unbroken litany of publishing credits pilfered from artists, unpaid royalties, and envelopes stuffed with illegal payola.” [p145]

Here begins the story of Steve Jobs and how the iPod changed things:
o 2001, iPod undergoes “whirlwind development.”
o 2002, SJobs sets his eyes on a digital music store. Problem: “How do you get people to want to pay for what they can get for free?”
o How could he succeed where others had failed? SJobs was powerful and rich, that’s why. With varying forms of capital, he negotiated with the major companies the rules for iTunes downloading—songs forever, files on three computers, burnable ten times.
o April 2003, iTunes Music Store launches with 200,000 songs (2 million by 2006) to tremendous success, attributable in part to the Mac software formatting and compatibility with the iPod itself. Also, purchasing was made easy and understandable.
o October 2003, iTunes launches for Windows. Another success.
o 2004, SJobs predicts the eradication of physical media.

Good and bad: On one hand, iTunes caused the regression of music from the album to the single—probably a bad thing. On the other hand, Levy points out this actually widens distributive options, citing a successful three-song release from Liz Phair.


“Identity”
The most two important quotes:
o “Playlist is character.” [p23]
o “It’s not just what you like—it’s who you are.” [p26]

From the analog music-lover’s perspective, the iPod as identity is eternally detrimental to self-identity. The scarcity and obscurity of once hallowed music is undermined by digital availability. Levy cites Kelefa Sanneh “…it’s getting harder to find any music at all that’s hard to find.” [p24]

From the digital music-lover’s perspective, the iPod as identity is phenomenal, and this trend seems to be growing.

Notable people with iPods that Levy mentions: George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Pope Benedict XVI, Dick Cheney, various movie stars.

Levy briefly discusses the iTunes sharing feature as a window to digital voyeurism (borderline fetishism), affirming it as a source of identity. His anecdotal proof fails to convince, though his use of the term “impression management” indicates the phenomenon all iPod users are inherently aware of. Levy also pens the phrase “opening the iTunes kimono.”


Another article that I read per Mark Perlman's Music and Modern Life course here at Brown is Gerald Marzorati's "How the Album Got Played Out".

• In 1997, Radiohead’s Ok Computer received universal critical praise but faced relatively disappointing sales.
• Marzorati blaims the decline in popularity of the LP format, particularly among the affluent white males who once voraciously consumed albums in their entirety.
• This decline is not a result of a stagnant creativity, but unbearable pressure on major labels to generate quarterly profits, increasingly standardized radio playlists, and most importantly the ease with which listeners can scan through an album, re-arrange its tracklist, or select only the songs they want via digital downloading.
• In the late 1960’s pop artists like Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and the Beach Boys began experimenting with the LP format, crafting strings of songs that functioned as a cohesive unit rather than a collection of singles.
• Today, listeners are showing less and less patience for conceptual albums and a greater willingness to buy albums based on one song. As a result, labels are investing more in potential one-hit wonders and less in album-oriented rock musicians.
• Marzorati imagines a future where full albums are reduced to collector’s items for diehard fans, while general public continues to consume what they want, when they want it, with their finger constantly hovering over the “Next Track” button.

Miller (questions)

1. If the choice of music in GTA helps the gamer to identify with his/her criminal avatar, does it not reduce the impact of the violent/sexual situations which the gamer must traverse? What is the significance of being able to hum a song you know while digitally recreating a drive-by shooting?

2. Inversely, do the gamers' strong associations with the crime and brutality in GTA and its soundtrack reinforce the social and cultural stereotypes of hip-hop and violence? Though Rockstar Games successfully recreate an historical setting in a digital realm, do the responses of gamers reflect anything more than a face-value reading of music associated with crime, violence, and negative stereotypes of American urban life?

3. [for the class] Think about your daily life, the music you listen to as you go about mundane activities. Think about music you use in different circumstances, music that triggers excitement, fear, aggression. If you yourself were "in" this game, what music would soundtrack your own GTA experience?

Ethnography project -- Second thoughts / iPod+identity

UPDATE:

As I reread my proposal against other students' ideas, I understand that the breadth of my subject might be too much for the undertaking. To narrow, I believe I am going to focus specifically on the idea of iPods and personal identity. Through interviews, field research, and historical readings, I will attempt to outline some of the aforementioned changing trends in personal identity by interviewing young people about the contents of their iPods, how they use this music, and how they identify with both the music and the technology. As a point of contrast, I will also interview older adults about their record collections and analog technologies. Within these interviews, I aim to address subjects such as personal choice, emotion, identification, musical geography, cultural boundaries, distribution, and other aspects of music that affect personal identity.

Added source ideas:
Tia DeNora, "Music as a technology of the self"
Steven Levy, The perfect thing: how the iPod shuffles commerce, culture, and coolness
Chris Anderson, "The Long Tail"
Mark Levine, "Pandora Maps the Musical Genome"

Ethnography Project -- First thoughts

My primary interest regarding musical youth cultures is not the collective, it is the individual. The more we examine cut-up aesthetic, sampling, and remix culture, the more we understand the modern notion of personal identity as being one of multiplicative symbiosis between cultures and codes--a notion that centralizes variety and excludes exclusion. For my project this semester, my plan is to examine recent literature regarding digital downloading, remix culture, mash-ups and electronic sampling, streaming radio, and iPod technologies, and to contrast this with some of the more historical subcultural texts examining specific trends and technologies from past generations. Equally, I will augment my theoretical study with surveys from youth participants in the aforementioned cultures/technologies (qualitative, quantitative, or both: TBD) to illuminate what I predict will be an increasing "interconnectedness" between subcultures currently, more so than in the past. While this trend may be predictable, my intent through fieldwork, interviews and current theoretical study is to trace a substantive link between the subcultural overlap in collective identity with a similar overlap in personal identity. It is my contention that individuals recognize greater social inclusion due to cultural overlaps in the wake of recent trends and technologies. The now-dated inclination for identity per exclusion has been sublimated into numerous personal identities, redefining the self as a converging Venn diagram. While this theory is preliminary, I hope that narrowing the focus to specific technologies and a target group will illustrate a characteristic example of what my theoretical study will expound as a larger social pattern.

Source ideas:
Dick Hebdige, Subculture: the Meaning of Style
DJ Spooky aka That Subliminal Kid, Rhythm Science
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste
[more soon]

Weinstein

In beginning Weinstein's essay on metal culture, my worry was that it would fail to address metal the way that Hodkinson had failed to address goth: "Why metal?" However, Weinstein essentially begins with just this answer, describing how metal may stand as a "folk" culture in a commercial setting, one that outwardly appears to be a passive, collective mass. Weinstein astutely cites that each time a metal fan strikes the pose of an air-guitar, the connectedness of metal culture is not only illustrated, but strengthened. From this reductive view, Weinstein acknowledges that while music is a central element of metal culture, it does not define it; I believe that this methodology of analysis is more revealing about a musical subculture and better identifies what connects music, audience, symbol, and society.

One of the more enlightening observations Weinstein makes of metal culture is in its origins, identifying that it was born from both the psychedelic and machismo attitudes of 1960s youth culture. Its earliest proponents, "white, male, and heterosexual youth became socioculturally de-centered by emerging movements of women, gays, and nonwhites. Nostalgia for centricity, then, also had its part in the metal subculture's conservation of the 1960s." [p101] Noting that these characteristics do not sum up all metal's members, I believe Weinstein well phrases the latent inertia that underlies many youth subcultures, saying "there could have been no heavy metal music if there had been no incipient subculture ready to guide and embrace it." [p102] An oft overlooked circumstance in musical subcultures, the music is itself a product of the culture.

Aside, I think it is important to add to Weinstein's section "Male" that since its publication, numerous metal icons have come out as homosexual or supporting homosexuality, including Rob Halford of Judas Priest, who Weinstein cites as a central metal proponent.

As he evaluates metal's evolution through the 1970s, or "me decade" as he quotes Tom Wolfe, Weinstein downplays metal's musical origins in the 1960s. He attempts to correlate metal's rise with a generation's Utopian disillusionment being shattered to social apathy. On the contrary, I think that the teenage indifference metal initially brought to light had latently existed since Elvis. Weinstein even quotes the Who as professing "I hope I die before I get old" as teenage motto of the mid-1960s. Bands such as the Stooges, Black Sabbath, the Velvet Underground, and Alice Cooper predated the downfall of the hippie movement and the rise of metal as it is known today; the metallic seeds had been planted long before the spirit of the 1960s drew to a close. One who says the teenagers' angst was not of their own making clearly misunderstands teenagers and the allure of heavy metal.

Briefly, Weinstein proceeds to evaluate metal culture in terms of its audience's ethnic composition (white) and socioeconomic status (working class). Weinsteins evaluations are again thorough, yet not as enlightening as his findings on metal's origins. From here, Weinstein moves into the discussion of his McClary-cum-Megadeth term "the music itself": music, lyrics, and styles of metal.

Beginning with the music, Weinstein identifies loud volumes, heavy bottom sounds, and guitar virtuosity as central to heavy metal's appeal. Discussing metal lyrics, he observes that their significance varies greatly throughout the subculture, yet serve two primary functions: one, they act as a unifying symbol for fans who memorize them by rote, not unlike Americans and the Star-Spangled Banner; and two, they are a platform for the culture's fascination with the aesthetics of human vocal performance, the "spine-chilling screams, sounds that come from another world." [p126] As Weinstein moves to contrast conventional youth dances with "headbanging," his comments on metal style differ from other youth subcultures by noting: "Heavy metal is not cool. It is not hip." [p132] The essence of metal stems from a different unifying facet of youthful rebellion; it seeks not to redefine what is chic and hip, replacing the outdated, but to build upon an existing tradition which celebrates all that is angst, dark, brutal and heavy. In metal, Weinstein describes, the style and symbolism is abundant, yet the music is central--the inherent link between the two is metal's self-perpetuating appeal: "It is great as music for what it does to [the fans]--how it draws them into it, excites them, and finally leaves them wasted, completely spent, having burned the potlatch of their youthful vitality and purged their emotions." [p143]

Discussion question(s): Is the development of metal truly different than other subcultures, or is the study of metal simply more thorough? At what point does a subculture becomes a "culture," and, in becoming so, at what point does a subculture become self-aware (or can it)? Can subcultures shape their own future--if so, why do more not follow the path of metal? Why are not there more musical subcultures as strong, vibrant as metal?

Slobin

"Music in Diaspora: The View from Euro-America" begins with Slobin's strong claim of why music and its context in daily human life must be studied: it is simply unavoidable. "...music has always been wired into the mobile body, forming earliest memories and later evoking deep-set emotions." [p244] Because of this significance, the influence of music in the ethnic diaspora is central to understanding any people in their geographic or social location, according to Slobin, with which I agree. He also specifies that music not only reveals patterns within cultures, but between cultures as well.

Through the essay, Slobin attempts to define the relationship between the "superculture" and varying subcultural diaspora. He admits that subcultures elude definition, and thus the relations between subcultures, or between sub- and supercultures, are difficult to define, though cites examples that illustrate both definition and relationship. Specifically, Slobin identifies individuals, or "activists," that often serve as proponents for small subcultures or crossovers in which individuals navigate dual-identities, such as Cuban-American / African-American in the case of Jon Secada [p249]. He concludes the essay by discussing these individuals in the greater context of "oppositionality," which addresses high-cultures's incorporation of low-culture, often realized by superculture's incorporation of subculture--a challenge to diaspora cultures who seek both recognition and respect, inclusion and independence.

Discussion question(s): how can a subculture assert itself within a superculture without being incorporated, commercialized, or generally taken advantage of? Is it possible for a subculture to exist simultaneously, or is the cultural hierarchy unavoidable? How do ethnographic diaspora differ from the social diaspora of the subcultures we've already examined? And, how can we contextualize musical youth cultures in terms of Slobin's definitions of cultural diaspora?

Hodkinson

Hodkinson's analysis of British goth culture focuses on its strength of translocal connections as elemental to its identity. He begins by identifying the abstract connections of personal identity and taste before expanding his analysis to "concrete" connections via commerce and media, specifically citing the Internet as new ground for subcultural expansion.

Though Hodkinson's analysis and discussion of goth is thorough throughout, there is very little relating his findings to the goth culture itself, nor any justification of goth as his subject of study. In fact, most of his analyses read as general statements on youth culture in general. "Meanwhile, key influential individuals such as DJs were equally liable to pick up musical ideas and influences from attending events elsewhere, ideas which may then be imported back into the set list of their local goth club." [p137] This quotation could easily be applied to various youth cultures, just as Hodkinson's discussion of the impact of specialty shops could be linked to the style of any subculture. By not discussing the significance of any signs, symbols, capital, or communications specific to goth culture, Hodkinson fails to answer the simple question of how goth distinguishes itself from any other subculture. More specifically, his introduction of goth's tenets illustrate its members' tendencies toward reclusion, isolation, and individualism, yet at no point does he reconcile these with his description of social networking and collective identity, presumably counterintuitive to other youth subcultures, such as Thornton's discussion of acid-house culture which is based on highly social clubs and raves.

Discussion question(s): Why goth? How are goth's symbols and culture linked? If punk remnants can be identified in goth, what are they, and how do they differ?

UPDATE: After watching the goth special on the Culture Show, I believe even more strongly that the aesthetics of goth, while lie central to the collective identity, do not suffice as subcultural essence without greater contextualization. As Donny Robbins dresses up in goth attire and claims to "feel" goth, he seemingly only does so because other goths complimented his garb. In actuality, Robbins displayed little of the theatricality, self-indulgence or fetishism that underlies the gothic fascination with imagery. I believe that he and Hodkinson both fail to explain why goth really is what it is and how it exists as a subculture.