Aram Sinnreich

MediaCon Panel with Trevor Pinch & DJ Spooky (audio)

This weekend, I was fortunate to host a keynote discussion between media theorist (and Moog afficionado) Trevor Pinch and DJ/author Paul D. Miller, a/k/a DJ Spooky. It was part of an excellent conference called "Extending Play" organized by the doctoral students at Rutgers SC&I. 

Our panel was a lot of fun -- a freewheeling discussion that ranged from music and tech geekery to broad social theory. You can listen to the audio transcript here:

ExtendingPlay_Keynote_Sinnreich_Pinch_Miller

 

 

New article: "Welcome to Alphaville, Avoid the Ghetto"

Truthdig.com just published my new article, "Welcome to Alphaville, Avoid the Ghetto." It's about what happens when smartphones turn our entire life into a giant search engine, and then selectively hide the results without telling us.

...The world we see through our smartphones is a curated world, and its horizons are constricting, rather than expanding. Though they’re often billed as modern-day Diogenes’ lamps, outshining the light of day with the light of truth (or “augmenting reality,” in contemporary geekspeek), they would be better understood as corporate-sponsored guidebooks to our own lives, keeping us on the prescribed path and off the road less traveled....

For more, read the article on Truthdig.

Existential Ebonics?

I had a thought this morning about the much-maligned (and oft-defended) use of the Ebonics constructions "I be" and "you be." There's been a longstanding argument between those who view it as a crippling bastardization of "correct" English grammar and those who legitimize it by arguing that (a) it is closer to the grammar of America's founding fathers than contemporary accepted (white) grammar is, and/or (b) to criticize it as inferior to accepted grammar is a racist rejection of its self-contained and Afrocentric logics.

I guess my idea falls close to, but not quite inside, the (b) category above. I was thinking about those rare occasions when the phrase "you be" occurs in the context of "correct" grammar. The only one I can think of is when the verb "to be" takes the imperative mood, as when two people are playing billiards and one says "I'll be solids, you be stripes." I can't think of any "correct" appearances of the formulation "I be," but the "I'll be" above (future continuous, I guess you'd call it) is pretty close.

So, that brings us back to Ebonics.

What is the significance of the fact that the dominant formulation of the verb "to be" takes its cues from the imperative mood and future continuous tense? It seems to me there's an implicit existentialist argument here, directly related to African American slavery and its legacy of social immobility. 

To put it plainly, my premise is this:

When black Americans use the phrase "you be," it is not a description, but an exhortation. "You be" is a command, a requirement, that in the face of a socioeconomic system that treats you like chattel, you must remain human, and in the face of violence and privation, you must remain alive. Stay alive, Stay human. You be. 

Similarly, we can view the future continuous-sounding "I('ll) be" as an implicit promise of reciprocation, a pledge. As in, if you stay alive and human, so will I. There is no present tense for us, the grammar seems to argue, so if we are to exist, it must be in the future. Try to stay alive till then.

I'm not a linguist, so for all I know, this is well-worn theoretical ground. But even so, it's an interesting idea, I think.

 

Aram to Russian Gov: Ease Up On the Capitalism, OK? [audio + slides]

A few weeks ago, I had the honor and pleasure to give a talk in Moscow for the Russian Government, who are in the process of assessing their Intellectual Property policy, as well as Google, who co-organized the event.

While most of the other speakers (record and movie execs, WIPO officials, IP attorneys, think tankers, etc) focused on specific IP policy items, I chose instead to focus on creative communities themselves, in whose name intellectual property law is enacted and enforced. Specifically, I focused on six creative communities (three traditional, three emerging) that have thrived in the absence of copyright control or enforcement, both in terms of cultural innovation and economic benefit. (For more in-depth analysis, see the book chapter about music and fashion I co-authored with Marissa Gluck a few years back).

The specific creative communities I discussed included quilting, food, fashion, mashups, doujinshi, fansubbing, and Filipino cover bands.

The talk went over well, but whether I swayed the Russians away from potential copyright maximalism remains to be seen. Below are audio from my talk, as well as my PowerPoint slides.

You can listen to the audio here: http://bit.ly/sinnrussia2011

And here are the slides: http://slidesha.re/jKSMJM

UPDATE:

A few weeks after my talk, President Medvedev addressed the G8 summit, and expressed his doubts about the strategic value of copyright maximalism. In his words:

"The declaration reflects an absolutely conservative position that intellectual property rights should be protected according to the existing conventions. No one questions that, but I have repeatedly stated that, unfortunately, those conventions were written 50 or almost 100 years ago, and they are unable to regulate the whole complex of relations between the copyright owner and users. . . Unfortunately, this was not included in the declaration because, in my opinion, my colleagues have a more conservative opinion than is necessary at the moment. Or maybe they just don't use the Internet and have little understanding of it."

I'm sure I can't take full credit for this, but I'd like to think I played a small role.

New Syllabus: Musical Cultures & Industries

Five years ago, I taught a class I loved at USC called "Music as Communication." I've substantially revamped the syllabus, and am now teaching "Musical Cultures and Industries" to my Rutgers undergrads this Spring.

Below is a draft of the syllabus. I welcome your comments.

1/18: Introduction

1/25: I Am What I Play: Music and Identity

• Turnbull, C. M. (1968). The Forest People. Chapter 4, pp 73-93.
• Lipsitz, G. (1990). Cruising around the historical bloc: postmodern and popular music in East Los Angeles. In K. Gelder and S. Thornton (Eds.), The Subcultures Reader. pp. 350-359.
• Sacks, O. (2008). Musicophilia, Chapter 29, pp. 371-388

OPTIONAL:

• Mingus, C. (1971). Beneath the Underdog. New York: Vintage. Chapter 31, pp. 283-304.

 2/1: Blinding You With Science: What Makes Music Work?

• Levitin, D. This is Your Brain on Music. Chapters 1 & 3
• Sacks, O. (2008). Musicophilia, Chapter 4

2/8: The Song Remains the Same: Where Music Comes From

• D'Olivet, F. (1997). The Secret Lore of Music (J. Godwin, trans.). Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions. Chapter 4.
• Dylan, B. (2004). Chronicles, Volume One. Chapter 5.
• Carter, S. (2010). Jay-Z: Decoded, pp. 22-31; 54-59
• Demers, J. (2006). Steal This Music. Chapter 2

2/15: A Love Supreme: Music and Spirituality

• Hebdige, D. (1987). Cut 'n' mix: cultural identity and Caribbean music. London: Comedia, Chapters 5-6, pp. 29-44)
• Berendt, J.-E. (1983). The World is Sound: Nada Brahma (Insla Verla, trans.). Rochester, VT: Destiny Books. Chapter 11, pp. 173-182
• Shaw, G. B. (1990). “A Messiah for Heathens” in J. Sullivan (ed.), Words on Music. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. pp. 76-79
  
  OPTIONAL:
• d'Olivet, Chapter 6-7, pp. 94-109

2/22: Babylon Burning: Music and Politics

Guest: Vivien Goldman, Veteran Punk Journalist

• Goldman, V. (2006). The Book of Exodus. Chapter 9.
• Scherzinger, M., & Smith, S. (2007). From blatant to latent protest (and back again): on the politics of theatrical spectacle in Madonna's ‘American Life’. Popular Music, 26(2), 211-29.
• Crist, S. A. (2009). Jazz as Democracy? Dave Brubeck and Cold War Politics. The Journal of Musicology, 26(2), pp. 133-174.

3/1: Music Industry, Side A: 20^th Century Lockdown

• Caves, R. E. (2002) Creative Industries. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Chapters 3 & 9 &18 (music sections thereof), pp. 61-67, 146-160, 286-296
• Dannen, F. (1990). Hit men: power brokers and fast money inside the music business. New York: Times Books. Chapter 1, pp. 3-17.
• Albini, S. (1997). The Problem of Music. In Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland (eds.) Commodify your dissent: salvos from the Baffler. New York: Norton. pp. 164-176.

3/8: Music Industry, Side B: 21^st Century Freakout

Guest: [name redacted], VP, VH1

• Sinnreich, A. (2011). Written testimony in Arista Records v. Lime Group.
• Charnas, D. (2010). The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop. Chapter 8.

SPRING BREAK

3/22: FIELD TRIP: TBA

 Take-home Midterm Due

3/29: Pretty Fly for a White Guy: Music and Race

• Kun, J. Audiotopia: Music, Race and America. Chapter 2.
• Cateforis, T. Performing the Avant-Garde Groove: Devo and the Whiteness of the New Wave. American Music, 22(4), 564-588.
• Kelley, R. D. G. (1994). Race Rebels: Culture, Politics and the Black Working Class. Chapter 8.

OPTIONAL

• Saul, S. (2003). Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties. By Scott Saul. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Chapter 2, pp. 61-96

4/5: I Wanna Be a Macho Man: Music, Gender and Sexuality

• Frank, G. (2007). Discophobia: Antigay Prejudice and the 1979 Backlash against Disco. Journal of the History of Sexuality, 15(2), pp. 276-306
• Ehrenreich, et al. (1992). Beatlemania: A Sexually Defiant Consumer Subculture? In K. Gelder and S. Thornton (Eds.), The Subcultures Reader. pp. 350-359.
• Peter Watrous (1994). Why Women Remain At the Back of the Bus. New York Times
• Von Bingen, H. (1994). The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen (J. L. Baird & R. K. Ehrman, trans.). New York: Oxford. Letter # 23, pp. 76-80.

4/12: Do You Believe in Bed Intruders? Music, Authenticity and Technology

• Barthes, R. (1977) Image, Music, Text (Stephen Heath, Ed. and trans.). New York: Hill. Chapter: “The Grain of the Voice,” pp. 179-189
• Sterne, J. (2003). The Audible Past. Chapter 5.
• Auner, J. (2003). Sing it for me: Posthuman ventriloquism in recent popular music. Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 128, 98-122.

4/19: Two Turntables and a Microphone: Mixing and Mashing

• Sinnreich, A. (2010). Mashed Up: Music, Technology, and the Rise of Configurable Culture. University of Massachusetts Press.
• New York Times, 2011. The Recombinant DNA of the Mash-Up.

4/26: Conclusion: Listening Party

The teen social networks gospel (according to danah)

My friend danah boyd, who recently received her doctorate from Berkeley's Information School, just made her dissertation available online. I haven't read it yet, but I've spent a lot of time reading her past work, and sharing panels with her at conferences, so I'm confident it's a doozy. In fact, I'll go so far as to say that this will very likely emerge as the definitive academic work on social networks from the Web 2.0 era. I can't think of anyone else (except maybe her mentor, Mimi Ito) who's done so much solid ethnographic work on teens and online community.

I have a feeling I'll be assigning sections of this in many classes to come...

Here's the details:

"Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics"

http://www.danah.org/papers/TakenOutOfContext.pdf

Abstract: As social network sites like MySpace and Facebook emerged, American teenagers began adopting them as spaces to mark identity and socialize with peers. Teens leveraged these sites for a wide array of everyday social practices - gossiping, flirting, joking around, sharing information, and simply hanging out. While social network sites were predominantly used by teens as a peer-based social outlet, the unchartered nature of these sites generated fear among adults. This dissertation documents my 2.5-year ethnographic study of American teens' engagement with social network sites and the ways in which their participation supported and complicated three practices - self-presentation, peer sociality, and negotiating adult society.

My analysis centers on how social network sites can be understood as networked publics which are simultaneously (1) the space constructed through networked technologies and (2) the imagined community that emerges as a result of the intersection of people, technology, and practice. Networked publics support many of the same practices as unmediated publics, but their structural differences often inflect practices in unique ways. Four properties - persistence, searchability, replicability, and scalability - and three dynamics - invisible audiences, collapsed contexts, and the blurring of public and private - are examined and woven throughout the discussion.

While teenagers primarily leverage social network sites to engage in common practices, the properties of these sites configured their practices and teens were forced to contend with the resultant dynamics. Often, in doing so, they reworked the technology for their purposes. As teenagers learned to navigate social network sites, they developed potent strategies for managing the complexities of and social awkwardness incurred by these sites. Their strategies reveal how new forms of social media are incorporated into everyday life, complicating some practices and reinforcing others. New technologies reshape public life, but teens' engagement also reconfigures the technology itself.

Obama, the Mash-up President

Smarter folks than me have long realized that musical innovation often seems to precede social and political change. Even back in the day, Plato warned that "when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them."

A large portion of my research in recent years has attempted to apply this premise to new forms of digital and sample-based music, especially the mash-up -- a musical form that combines several preexisting recordings into a new composition/performance that is both completely derivative and completely original.

Today, basking in the glow of last night's ecstatic coup d'etat, it occurred to me that Barack Obama's ascent to the presidency is (thus far) the defining political manifestation of the mash-up aesthetic/ethic. Or, to put it another way, the man is himself a walking mash-up.

Obviously, there's the racial angle -- with a black African father and a white Kansan mother, he is a living rejection of the American racial binary. By the way, this transgressing of ethnic and cultural lines is also a fundamental, and conscious, goal of the mash-up ethic. As DJ Adrian of Bootie told me, "The audience [at our club] is so mashed up, like the music, and that’s [what] we’re most proud of."

But there are other mashed-up aspects of Obama, as well. His rhetoric is equal parts MLK and Harvard Law. His social agenda combines the "personal responsibility" and "family values" mantras of mainstream (pre-Bush) conservativism with pro-choice, pro-civil rights liberalism. His persona is both young and old, immigrant and native son, Christian, Muslim, and rational humanist. He is both a political insider, a scion of the Chicago Democratic machine, and consummate outsider, a first-term senator with a platform built on "change." He is from Hawaii, Kansas, Illinois, Kenya, and Indonesia. He is both "Barry" and "Hussein."

Critics have suggested that Obama's multifacetedness is just a blind, that he's a chimerical Zelig figure, a screen against which we hopeless optimists project our wildest fantasies.

Maybe.

But I think he's more mash-up than chimera. Like "Smells Like Booty," "Careless or Dead," or -- most obviously -- the Grey Album, Obama is far more than the sum of his parts. His unique juxtaposition of cultural and political logics creates a meta-logic that reveals the deeper truths uniting these seemingly disparate strands, and exposes some of our deepest beliefs to be nothing more than self-fulfilling prophecies of self-negation.

Our categories have bound us for too long. It's time for us to become a full-spectrum society, made of fully realized individuals. Mash-ups give us a template for understanding how society needs to evolve, and Obama has given us the hope that we can get there.

Griefers: The Anti-Situationists?

For my masters course in digital media yesterday, I assigned Julian Dibbell's excellent, if flawed, Wired article on griefers, as well as a few critiques of the article.

As often happens with grad classes, I felt that my students had an excellent understanding of the subject matter, but not much historical contextualization.

I thought it would be interesting to discuss the griefer methodology, namely interrupting the normal flow of behaviors and protocols in online social environments, as a descendant of Guy Debord and the Situationists. (Similarly, my friends and colleagues Doug Thomas and Biella Coleman have both chronicled the Yippie origins of the hacker movement).

But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that griefers are really anti-situationists. What do I mean by this? Dubord and company were revolutionaries, attempting to forge a "new culture, independent of the political and union organizations which currently exist," through their theatrical disruptions. By contrast, griefers are (mostly) a bunch of white, male, middle-class, middle-Americans who use racist avatars (such as the "Patriotic Nigras") to disrupt furries, fantasists, and other "deviants" and dreamers from enacting their alternative lifestyles online.

In other words, griefers use the methods of the Situationists, and the tools of hackers, to enact a reactionary political agenda that is anathema to the Situationist movement, and to most hacker cultures. In a way, they are almost agents-provocateur, giving a bad name to the online environments and communities which threaten their "real world" hegemonic power.

In a way, then, the Situationist claim that we should treasure "the value of the game, of life freely constructed" is opposite in both literal meaning and political valence to the griefer battle cry that "the Internet is serious business."

Just a thought, at the moment, but hopefully when I get a little time, I can work this up into a more formal journal article.

Black + Otaku = New hybrid subculture?

In the year since we got back to NYC, Dunia and I have noticed a new trend on the streets: black American teens dressed up like Otaku, replete with straightened hair, Hello Kitty knapsacks, and cute gadgets. I guess this was inevitable, but it's interesting to see it finally manifest -- especially after all the science fiction on the subject (Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, etc.)

I've coined an appropriately un-PC term for this phenomenon: "Brotaku." Although, to be fair, Google tells me there are already 117 web pages with this term (most of them appear to be usernames).

Unfortunately, we haven't been able to snap a pic of any of these kids yet, but I'll update the post when we do.

I guess this is kind of a reciprocal movement to the whole Ganguro thing (see below):

Color-coded politics

Color-coded politics
Originally uploaded by Aram Sinnreich

Just spotted this on the street in NYC's financial district. I'm no expert on the semiotics of baseball cap colors, but it's pretty clear to me that only women and art students would wear the Hillary hat, and only old guys driving big American-made sedans would wear the McCain hat. Whereas the neutral, patriotic white and blue Obama hats would probably appeal to a much larger segment of the population.

The question is -- do the colors reflect anything meaningful about voter demographics? After all, the brilliant thing about the market (in theory) is that its foremost incentive is to match supply as closely as possible to demand. Were the pink McCain hats returned unpurchased to the manufacturer? Did the brown Obama hats connote too much racial affiliation? Or are the manufacturers just hedging their bets?