Music and Digital Media: A planetary anthropology

Anthropology has neglected the study of music. Music and Digital Media shows how and why this should be redressed. It does so by enabling music to expand the horizons of digital anthropology, demonstrating how the field can build interdisciplinary links to music and sound studies, digital/media studies, and science and technology studies. Music and Digital Media is the first comparative ethnographic study of the impact of digital media on music worldwide. It offers a radical and lucid new theoretical framework for understanding digital media through music, showing that music is today where the promises and problems of the digital assume clamouring audibility. The book contains ten chapters, eight of which present comprehensive original ethnographies; they are bookended by an authoritative introduction and a comparative postlude. Five chapters address popular, folk, art and crossover musics in the global South and North, including Kenya, Argentina, India, Canada and the UK. Three chapters bring the digital experimentally to the fore, presenting pioneering ethnographies of an extra-legal peer-to-peer site and the streaming platform Spotify, a series of prominent internet-mediated music genres, and the first ethnography of a global software package, the interactive music platform Max. The book is unique in bringing ethnographic research on popular, folk, art and crossover musics from the global North and South into a comparative framework on a large scale, and creates an innovative new paradigm for comparative anthropology. It shows how music enlarges anthropology while demanding to be understood with reference to classic themes of anthropological theory

Music and Digital Media

Anthropology has neglected the study of music. Music and Digital Media shows how and why this should be redressed. It does so by enabling music to expand the horizons of digital anthropology, demonstrating how the field can build interdisciplinary links to music and sound studies, digital/media studies, and science and technology studies. Music and Digital Media is the first comparative ethnographic study of the impact of digital media on music worldwide. It offers a radical and lucid new theoretical framework for understanding digital media through music, showing that music is today where the promises and problems of the digital assume clamouring audibility. The book contains ten chapters, eight of which present comprehensive original ethnographies; they are bookended by an authoritative introduction and a comparative postlude. Five chapters address popular, folk, art and crossover musics in the global South and North, including Kenya, Argentina, India, Canada and the UK. Three chapters bring the digital experimentally to the fore, presenting pioneering ethnographies of anextra-legal peer-to-peer site and the streaming platform Spotify, a series of prominent internet-mediated music genres, and the first ethnography of a global software package, the interactive music platform Max. The book is unique in bringing ethnographic research on popular, folk, art and crossover musics from the global North and South into a comparative framework on a large scale, and creates an innovative new paradigm for comparative anthropology. It shows how music enlarges anthropology while demanding to be understood with reference to classic themes of anthropological theory. Praise for Music and Digital Media ‘Music and Digital Media is a groundbreaking update to our understandings of sound, media, digitization, and music. Truly transdisciplinary and transnational in scope, it innovates methodologically through new models for collaboration, multi-sited ethnography, and comparative work. It also offers an important defense of—and advancement of—theories of mediation.’ Jonathan Sterne, Communication Studies and Art History, McGill University 'Music and Digital Media is a nuanced exploration of the burgeoning digital music scene across both the global North and the global South. Ethnographically rich and theoretically sophisticated, this collection will become the new standard for this field.' Anna Tsing, Anthropology, University of California at Santa Cruz 'The global drama of music's digitisation elicits extreme responses – from catastrophe to piratical opportunism – but between them lie more nuanced perspectives. This timely, absolutely necessary collection applies anthropological understanding to a deliriously immersive field, bringing welcome clarity to complex processes whose impact is felt far beyond what we call music.' David Toop, London College of Communication, musician and writer ‘Spanning continents and academic disciplines, the rich ethnographies contained in Music and Digital Media makes it obligatory reading for anyone wishing to understand the complex, contradictory, and momentous effects that digitization is having on musical cultures.’ Eric Drott, Music, University of Texas, Austin ‘This superb collection, with an authoritative overview as its introduction, represents the state of the art in studies of the digitalisation of music. It is also a testament to what anthropology at its reflexive best can offer the rest of the social sciences and humanities.’ David Hesmondhalgh, Media and Communication, University of Leeds ‘This exciting volume forges new ground in the study of local conditions, institutions, and sounds of digital music in the Global South and North. The book’s planetary scope and its commitment to the “messiness” of ethnographic sites and concepts amplifies emergent configurations and meanings of music, the digital, and the aesthetic.’ Marina Peterson, Anthropology, University of Texas, Austi

New technologies of democracy: how the information and communication technologies are shaping new cultures of radical democratic politics.

What characterises contemporary democratic political struggles? According to the post-Marxist theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, it is their sheer unknowability, the fact that there can be no certainties, no fixed grounding. Drawing a distinction between the 'certainties' of classical Marxism (i. e. base/superstructure) and the more 'diffuse' nature of modem democratic demands (such as sexual and gender equality, environmentalism and the peace movements), the emergence of a post-Marxist perspective has endeavoured to engage the widening imaginaries of present-day democratic politics. In this thesis the central post-Marxist category of radical democracy, defined literally as the 'multiplication of public spaces of antagonism, is interrogated in relation to new modes and ideas of contemporary political struggle, particularly those associated with the expansion of the ICTs and networks. Arguing for the need to consider politics beyond the somewhat outmoded and uninspiring description of the 'new social movements', this thesis critically investigates the emerging practices of politics and activism enabled by the technologies like the Internet, using the ideas of post-Marxism as a basis for generating new theories of radical democracy. Looking in particular at the practices of Tactical Media and Culture Jamming, together with new methods of interaction and consumption, such as peer-to-peer file sharing and open publishing on the Internet, this study demonstrates how radical democracy contains as yet unthoughtout critical potentials through which to examine the ICTs in relation to these nascent cultures of politics. These emerging political cultures, this thesis suggests, entail the articulation of other ways of conceiving democracy, the political and politics more appropriate to the increasingly networked nature of contemporary society

Music and Digital Media

Anthropology has neglected the study of music. Music and Digital Media shows how and why this should be redressed. It does so by enabling music to expand the horizons of digital anthropology, demonstrating how the field can build interdisciplinary links to music and sound studies, digital/media studies, and science and technology studies. Music and Digital Media is the first comparative ethnographic study of the impact of digital media on music worldwide. It offers a radical and lucid new theoretical framework for understanding digital media through music, showing that music is today where the promises and problems of the digital assume clamouring audibility. The book contains ten chapters, eight of which present comprehensive original ethnographies; they are bookended by an authoritative introduction and a comparative postlude. Five chapters address popular, folk, art and crossover musics in the global South and North, including Kenya, Argentina, India, Canada and the UK. Three chapters bring the digital experimentally to the fore, presenting pioneering ethnographies of anextra-legal peer-to-peer site and the streaming platform Spotify, a series of prominent internet-mediated music genres, and the first ethnography of a global software package, the interactive music platform Max. The book is unique in bringing ethnographic research on popular, folk, art and crossover musics from the global North and South into a comparative framework on a large scale, and creates an innovative new paradigm for comparative anthropology. It shows how music enlarges anthropology while demanding to be understood with reference to classic themes of anthropological theory. Praise for Music and Digital Media ‘Music and Digital Media is a groundbreaking update to our understandings of sound, media, digitization, and music. Truly transdisciplinary and transnational in scope, it innovates methodologically through new models for collaboration, multi-sited ethnography, and comparative work. It also offers an important defense of—and advancement of—theories of mediation.’ Jonathan Sterne, Communication Studies and Art History, McGill University 'Music and Digital Media is a nuanced exploration of the burgeoning digital music scene across both the global North and the global South. Ethnographically rich and theoretically sophisticated, this collection will become the new standard for this field.' Anna Tsing, Anthropology, University of California at Santa Cruz 'The global drama of music's digitisation elicits extreme responses – from catastrophe to piratical opportunism – but between them lie more nuanced perspectives. This timely, absolutely necessary collection applies anthropological understanding to a deliriously immersive field, bringing welcome clarity to complex processes whose impact is felt far beyond what we call music.' David Toop, London College of Communication, musician and writer ‘Spanning continents and academic disciplines, the rich ethnographies contained in Music and Digital Media makes it obligatory reading for anyone wishing to understand the complex, contradictory, and momentous effects that digitization is having on musical cultures.’ Eric Drott, Music, University of Texas, Austin ‘This superb collection, with an authoritative overview as its introduction, represents the state of the art in studies of the digitalisation of music. It is also a testament to what anthropology at its reflexive best can offer the rest of the social sciences and humanities.’ David Hesmondhalgh, Media and Communication, University of Leeds ‘This exciting volume forges new ground in the study of local conditions, institutions, and sounds of digital music in the Global South and North. The book’s planetary scope and its commitment to the “messiness” of ethnographic sites and concepts amplifies emergent configurations and meanings of music, the digital, and the aesthetic.’ Marina Peterson, Anthropology, University of Texas, Austi

Digital material: tracing new media in everyday life and technology

Three decades of societal and cultural alignment of new media have yielded a host of innovations, trials, and problems, accompanied by versatile popular and academic discourse. New Media Studies crystallized internationally into an established academic discipline, and this begs the question: where do we stand now? Which new questions are emerging now that new media are being taken for granted, and which riddles are still unsolved? Is contemporary digital culture indeed all about 'you', the participating user, or do we still not really understand the digital machinery and how this constitutes us as 'you'? The contributors to the present book, all employed in teaching and researching new media and digital culture, assembled their 'digital material' into an anthology, covering issues ranging from desktop metaphors to Web 2.0 ecosystems, from touch screens to blogging and e-learning, from role-playing games and cybergothic music to wireless dreams. Together the contributions provide a showcase of current research in the field, from what may be called a 'digital-materialist' perspective.Nieuwe media zijn vanaf hun opkomst begeleid door revolutionaire beloften en bedreigingen: hypertekst zou lezers veranderen in auteurs, digitale beelden zouden de waarheid en werkelijkheid ondermijnen, en online communicatie zou alle afstanden overbruggen. 'Cyberspace' werd gevierd dan wel gevreesd als immaterieel en autonoom, losgezongen van onze dagelijkse leefwereld. Na twee decennia 'cyberrevolutie' zijn nieuwe media vanzelfsprekend geworden en blijken zij allesbehalve immaterieel. Vanuit dat perspectief belicht de bundel Digital Material digitale culturen. De bijdragen onderzoeken onder meer computer games, mobiele communicatie, interfacemetaforen, weblogculturen, software ontwikkeling en digitale beeldproductie. Bij elkaar vormen zij een inspirerend theoretisch kader om de hedendaagse betekenis van nieuwe media te doorgronden

Digital Material

Three decades of societal and cultural alignment of new media have yielded a host of innovations, trials, and problems, accompanied by versatile popular and academic discourse. New Media Studies crystallized internationally into an established academic discipline, and this begs the question: where do we stand now? Which new questions are emerging now that new media are being taken for granted, and which riddles are still unsolved? Is contemporary digital culture indeed all about 'you', the participating user, or do we still not really understand the digital machinery and how this constitutes us as 'you'? The contributors to the present book, all employed in teaching and researching new media and digital culture, assembled their 'digital material' into an anthology, covering issues ranging from desktop metaphors to Web 2.0 ecosystems, from touch screens to blogging and e-learning, from role-playing games and cybergothic music to wireless dreams. Together the contributions provide a showcase of current research in the field, from what may be called a 'digital-materialist' perspective

New technologies of democracy : how the information and communication technologies are shaping new cultures of radical democratic politics

What characterises contemporary democratic political struggles? According to the post-Marxist theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, it is their sheer unknowability, the fact that there can be no certainties, no fixed grounding. Drawing a distinction between the 'certainties' of classical Marxism (i. e. base/superstructure) and the more 'diffuse' nature of modem democratic demands (such as sexual and gender equality, environmentalism and the peace movements), the emergence of a post-Marxist perspective has endeavoured to engage the widening imaginaries of present-day democratic politics. In this thesis the central post-Marxist category of radical democracy, defined literally as the 'multiplication of public spaces of antagonism, is interrogated in relation to new modes and ideas of contemporary political struggle, particularly those associated with the expansion of the ICTs and networks. Arguing for the need to consider politics beyond the somewhat outmoded and uninspiring description of the 'new social movements', this thesis critically investigates the emerging practices of politics and activism enabled by the technologies like the Internet, using the ideas of post-Marxism as a basis for generating new theories of radical democracy. Looking in particular at the practices of Tactical Media and Culture Jamming, together with new methods of interaction and consumption, such as peer-to-peer file sharing and open publishing on the Internet, this study demonstrates how radical democracy contains as yet unthoughtout critical potentials through which to examine the ICTs in relation to these nascent cultures of politics. These emerging political cultures, this thesis suggests, entail the articulation of other ways of conceiving democracy, the political and politics more appropriate to the increasingly networked nature of contemporary society.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo