Listening In

This ACM article is a write-up of a study conducted on the social aspects of limited music sharing via I-tunes technology that manages to circumvent the complicated legal landscape of ip rights management and music sharing. (The music can only be shared via subnet and the file is streamed instead of actually copied.) A link to the full article can be found here, though you probably have to be on UT's campus to use it: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1054972.1054999&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=53223505&CFTOKEN=15055051.

What intrigued me about this article is that it describes both practices of popular curation and shared curation of digital objects. In terms of popular curation, I-tunes technology allows users to share their playlists with co-workers. However, you can choose which specific playlists you want to share, and you retain control over the naming of the list as well as the metadata tags of the individual songs (i-tunes retrieves song info via the net but the user has final authority to change the info on his or her individual machine.) What is really interesting about this, is that the study found that people used i-tunes' sharing features as a way of projecting identity, and thus the choice of which playlists to share (exhibit?) became tantamount. For instance one participant worried about some of the songs he purchased for his wife being spotted by co-workers:

I mean if people are looking at my playlist to get a picture of
the kind of music I like and don’t like, you know. Or to get a
little insight into what I’m about, it’d be kind of inaccurate
‘cuz there’s, you know, there’s Justin Timberlake and
there’s another couple of artists on here that…Michael
McDonald, you know. Some of this stuff I would not, you
know, want to be like kind of associated with it.…I guess
part of it is it wouldn’t be bad if, you know, people thought I
was kind of hip and current with my music instead of like an
old fuddy duddy with music. I mean I sort of like to
experiment a little bit with stuff. I mean I’m not like totally
wild but I like to experiment with, you know, some newer
stuff. So I guess it would be okay if people thought that I
had good taste. It wouldn’t be so good if they said “God! He
likes Justin Timberlake? That sucks!” (P1).

The whole concept reminded me of our discussion of the popular curation project at the Brooklyn museum but on a much more informal and individualistic scale. The fact that informal, individualistic curation regularly occurs also highlights the importance of creating infrastructure in the terms of knowledge, skill sets, and education on digital technology. Or perhaps, such knowledge is already ingrained but not formally articulated? I'm not sure.

However, the other thing that struck me here is that the curation responsibility is shared by i-tunes. As i mentioned earlier, the metadata tags associated with songs are initially included with their purchase or are downloaded via song recognition software if being imported from cd. Also, the default for sharing is to share nothing, so i-tunes helps enforce privacy. Finally, the availability of certain fields only as tags in someway informs the curation through software constraints.

All in all, though, I think popular curation as an expression of identity is a trend that will grow to encompass ever more fields in the future.