The Limits of the Digital Revolution: How Mass Media Culture Endures in a Social Media World by Derek Hrynyshyn

Author:Derek Hrynyshyn [Hrynyshyn, Derek]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Publisher: ABC-CLIO
Published: 2017-03-31T04:00:00+00:00

The Production of Meaning as a Social Process

Part of the difficulty in seeing the power the industry exercises is that the new forms of distributing and promoting musical recordings appear to empower individuals. With a smartphone in our hands and earbuds in our ears, no matter where we go in the urban environment, we are able to access musical content of our own choosing and combine different recordings into a playlist that will shape our unique auditory experience, shutting out the noise of the rest of society to create our own musical pleasures that can last as long as we like. This creates an impression of individuals producing their own meaning, independent from the corporate control of a radio station that has to cater to the lowest common denominator.

But the process of producing meaning, which is apparently individualized in the cultural form of smartphone-wielding and earbud-wearing mobile networked listeners, is always in reality a social process. Part of what it means to enjoy the music of a culture is that one is part of that culture. For most people, the music they will discover and come to enjoy will be that which is promoted by some major corporation in some form, even if it is only promoted to them as the result of some mysterious algorithm. If the song is a popular hit by some celebrity musician, it will be enjoyed while possessing at least the background knowledge that so many others also enjoy it. In other words, part of the meaning of a popular song is its popularity.

Even if one listens to more obscure music intended for smaller niche audiences, one has the awareness that it sets that individual out from the crowd—but then one is really just part of a different, smaller, and more dispersed crowd. With social media activity integrated into the music listening experience by the streaming service, it is likely that such listeners will be enjoying music that is recommended to them by other listeners—in which case, the enjoyment of the music is also shaped by the knowledge that it comes recommended by some particular individual with whom the listener has some preexisting relationship and knowledge of shared musical tastes.

The algorithms through which we encounter such music or other content do not work on the basis of the history of a single user’s choices but from the combination of all of the information about all users. This makes not only the production of meaning but also the selection of content a collective or social as opposed to an individual act. Individuals are not, then, freed from the constraints of a social system determining musical choices or liberated to choose music on their own in any meaningful way. The new means of listening to music does make it possible for individual tastes to be met differently and perhaps more precisely, but those tastes are not some autonomous creation that arises purely in the minds of individuals. Tastes have always been social; in a cultural economy in

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