It was suggested in Chapter 13 of this book that the normative principles of public service media... more It was suggested in Chapter 13 of this book that the normative principles of public service media (PSM) have become more rather than less relevant, have expanded and have gained a new urgency in the digital era. In what follows, a series of propositions are advanced, focused on the ways that such principles fi nd new expression in digital conditions. If the proponents of neoliberal economic thinking argue that the digital economy is best served, and best understood, in terms of the dynamics of competition operating within free markets, then the oligopolistic tendencies that have become pronounced in the last decade, manifest in the dominance of a few key digital intermediaries and in the rapid capacity to establish primacy in new digital markets, disprove such assumptions. This chapter therefore advances the need for public intervention in digital media markets on several levels, each of them important, each founded on and drawing legitimacy from the expanded normative principles set out in Chapter 13.
At the core of previous normative frameworks for public service broadcasting are four interrelate... more At the core of previous normative frameworks for public service broadcasting are four interrelated concepts: independence, universality, citizenship and quality. As yet, these norms have not evolved to meet the challenges posed by digital platforms as well as the increasing cultural diversity and stubborn inequalities of modern Britain. The proposition in what follows is that the principles of public service media (PSM), as opposed to public service broadcasting (PSB), have not diminished but expanded in the digital era. This chapter explores these principles in relation to PSM as a whole, but is particularly focused on the crucial role in delivering public service played by the BBC and Channel 4 both now and in the future.
Pp. 119-146 in Christian J. Emden and David Midgley (eds.) Beyond Habermas: Democracy, Knowledge, and the Public Sphere. London and New York: Berghahn, 2012
Pp. 163-180 in Deniz Peters, Gerhard Eckel and Andreas Dorschel (eds), Bodily Expression in Electronic Music: Perspectives on Reclaiming Performativity. New York and London: Routledge, 2012
... Basic tier channels have higher audiences but the rights to films are more expensive and they... more ... Basic tier channels have higher audiences but the rights to films are more expensive and they earn little (510 pence per subscriber) from the platform ... Sky had sewn up the UK market in first-run film rights for pay television by securing long-term output deals with all the major ...
It was suggested in Chapter 13 of this book that the normative principles of public service media... more It was suggested in Chapter 13 of this book that the normative principles of public service media (PSM) have become more rather than less relevant, have expanded and have gained a new urgency in the digital era. In what follows, a series of propositions are advanced, focused on the ways that such principles fi nd new expression in digital conditions. If the proponents of neoliberal economic thinking argue that the digital economy is best served, and best understood, in terms of the dynamics of competition operating within free markets, then the oligopolistic tendencies that have become pronounced in the last decade, manifest in the dominance of a few key digital intermediaries and in the rapid capacity to establish primacy in new digital markets, disprove such assumptions. This chapter therefore advances the need for public intervention in digital media markets on several levels, each of them important, each founded on and drawing legitimacy from the expanded normative principles set out in Chapter 13.
At the core of previous normative frameworks for public service broadcasting are four interrelate... more At the core of previous normative frameworks for public service broadcasting are four interrelated concepts: independence, universality, citizenship and quality. As yet, these norms have not evolved to meet the challenges posed by digital platforms as well as the increasing cultural diversity and stubborn inequalities of modern Britain. The proposition in what follows is that the principles of public service media (PSM), as opposed to public service broadcasting (PSB), have not diminished but expanded in the digital era. This chapter explores these principles in relation to PSM as a whole, but is particularly focused on the crucial role in delivering public service played by the BBC and Channel 4 both now and in the future.
Pp. 119-146 in Christian J. Emden and David Midgley (eds.) Beyond Habermas: Democracy, Knowledge, and the Public Sphere. London and New York: Berghahn, 2012
Pp. 163-180 in Deniz Peters, Gerhard Eckel and Andreas Dorschel (eds), Bodily Expression in Electronic Music: Perspectives on Reclaiming Performativity. New York and London: Routledge, 2012
... Basic tier channels have higher audiences but the rights to films are more expensive and they... more ... Basic tier channels have higher audiences but the rights to films are more expensive and they earn little (510 pence per subscriber) from the platform ... Sky had sewn up the UK market in first-run film rights for pay television by securing long-term output deals with all the major ...
AFTERWORD: MUSIC POLICY, AESTHETIC AND SOCIAL DIFFERENCE1 Georgina Born CULTURE, POLICY, AND THE ... more AFTERWORD: MUSIC POLICY, AESTHETIC AND SOCIAL DIFFERENCE1 Georgina Born CULTURE, POLICY, AND THE POLITICAL While her son Sacha, a pallid 10-year-old, gapes at Tom and Jerry on cable, [Galina] Kuznetsova, carefully made up for an evening in front ...
Digital ethnography has a double meaning, referring both to the ethnographic study of digital cul... more Digital ethnography has a double meaning, referring both to the ethnographic study of digital cultures and to the development of digital methodologies to enhance anthropological, ethnographic and related interdisciplinary research. In this paper we combine the two. We offer a critical and reflexive introduction to novel internet-based methodologies that complement offline ethnographic research. Our aim is to show the powers of such methodologies and how they can be used to supplement other sources of ethnographic insight. The chapter’s ethnographic focus is on two digital music cultures, both of which make significant use of the internet: Vaporwave, a contemporary genre, and Microsound, an established and long-standing one. By comparing the two genres, and analysing their online practices, we show how they represent distinctive moments in the evolution of the internet as a digital-cultural medium. We therefore contend that digital methodologies oriented to our actors’ uses of the internet must be attuned to its cultural and historical variation: to the internet itself as a cultural form, and its changing contributions to such digital-music assemblages. Methodologically, we adapt tools developed previously for Actor Network Theory: the issue crawler software (http://www.govcom.org/Issuecrawler_instructions.htm). Brought to digital music genres, these tools analyse the exchange of hyperlinks amongst actors online, mapping, visualising and making available for further analysis relations among some of the many entities––labels, platforms, venues, festivals, funding bodies, distributors, critics, bloggers, fans, co-artists, allies––that mediate, and are mobilised by, such genres. Coupled with analysis of the two genres’ offline social and cultural formations, and supported by qualitative insights from genre theory and media aesthetics, such network visualisations offer ways of significantly deepening the analysis of genres with online emanations. Yet, importantly, adequate interpretation of the network visualisations demand that they are combined them with other sources of ethnographic knowledge. Use of these tools, combined with the methodological principles we set out, can be transposed, we contend, into many spheres of ethnographic enquiry where cultural scenes and practices combine offline and online manifestations. At the outset, we analyse the distinctive ways in which uses of the internet enter into the aesthetic and communicative practices of Vaporwave and Microsound. We proceed to analyse the temporality of these practices––including the temporality of the web; through the case of Microsound, we trace the beginnings of the migration of electronic music cultures online in the mid-late 1990s, and through Vaporwave, we examine very current, transmedial aesthetic uses of the internet. Together, the two demonstrate how the web is employed, with various levels of emphasis, in several ways: 1) to circulate music in the form of text, recordings, and objects; 2) to cultivate, publicise and distribute knowledge and facilitate discussion, via blogs, mailing lists and fora; 3) to accumulate, and accelerate the accumulation of, cultural capital through the creation and exchange of symbolic, semiotic and material links; and 4) as an expressive and aesthetic medium, part of a genre’s larger transmedial aesthetic assemblage. Indeed, in the case of Vaporwave, the internet acts as a rudimentary content creator, providing––in the guise of recycled web content––the substantive material through which the music is realised. Our comparative analysis of Microsound and Vaporwave affords insights into the historicity of the web, showing how online communities and digitally-native practices have developed from ‘wide’, open, and often anonymous social networks to more ‘local’ and intimate communities that, in their small scale, seek to mimic or replicate ‘offline’, co-present musical socialities. In the case of Vaporwave, this historicity enters into the very aesthetics of the genre, as artists and other actors engage in knowing, postmodern play with the signifiers of the early days of web 2.0.
a broad range of expectations of the courtroom work group, with some of these expectations seemin... more a broad range of expectations of the courtroom work group, with some of these expectations seemingly beyond the purview of the court. If the young person successfully completes probation after being awarded youthful offender status, his record is sealed and he need not report his transgression on job applications. Ironically, it is in acting responsibly (as defined by the court), that young people are able to earn back their youthful designation. In spite of young people’s involvement with the MYP lasting much longer than other Parts in New York (17.2 months versus 9.4 months on average, citywide) and their higher levels of involvement with alternative programs, JOs in the MYP are less likely to earn youth offender status than JOs in other jurisdictions. Barrett’s discussion of the strategic use of bail is also revealing. The judge’s decision to detain a young person is either preventive (i.e., to minimize the possibility that a young person would be rearrested and jeopardize his potential to earn youthful offender status), punitive (i.e., to punish him for not following through on the court’s wishes, such as abiding by a curfew), or conciliatory (i.e., to appease a district attorney who is pushing for jail time.) Like delays, bail decisions reflect judicial discretion—this discretion includes considerations beyond those typically accepted as appropriate by the legal community. In addition to illustrating the use of discretion, Barrett’s discussion of bail illustrates the importance of the courtroom workgroup—at least some courtroom decisions have as much to do with conforming to workgroup expectations as they do with serving the needs of the defendants. During many of their interactions with the judge, young people are treated with parental or paternalistic concern. A considerable amount of the judge’s time is spent lecturing, encouraging, or admonishing the young people on his dockets. In addition, the court often tries to involve parents, though it is not legally required to do so. Courtroom personnel recognize that parental support is instrumental to the legal success of defendants; defendants rely on adults for transportation and housing, as well as for financial and emotional support. Not all defendants receive such support; they face homelessness, abuse, victimization, and more. Some young people’s lives are further complicated by their involvement with multiple state agencies beyond the MYP, including family court and child welfare services. Though defendants in the MYP are adults according to the law, the reality is that they occupy a blurred place between juvenile and adult. Describing how the judge negotiates within, and sometimes takes advantage of, this fuzzy place is Barrett’s fundamental contribution. As she rightly notes, whether or not the MYP is successful is a matter of debate; drawing such conclusions depends on what considerations are prioritized (e.g., costs, recidivism rates, defendant satisfaction, etc.) and the availability of quality data. Perhaps the most powerful conclusion about the MYP is that made by the judge who created it: the mandatory model of trying young people as adults should be abandoned for a discretionary transfer model. Such a model better reflects both empirical patterns in youthful offending—most young people ‘‘age out’’ of offending—and broad-based support from the public and the legal community for rehabilitative programs for juveniles. Until a discretionary model is implemented, works like Barrett’s help to reveal how legal actors attempt to ‘‘cultivate an active, rehabilitative justice in the age of retribution’’ (p. 20).
Buku ini mengintegrasikan penelitian tentang musikologi dan kajian tentang bunyi/suara dalam musi... more Buku ini mengintegrasikan penelitian tentang musikologi dan kajian tentang bunyi/suara dalam musik, dan bunyi/suara sebagai mediasi kehidupan sehari-hari. Bab diskusi musik dan suara dalam hubungannya dengan genre yang berbeda, teknologi dan pengaturan, termasuk seni instalasi, rekaman musik populer, kantor dan rumah sakit, dan terapi musik. Buku ini menawarkan sebuah perpektif global yang baru tentang bagaimana musik dan bunyi/suara dan transformasinya dapat mengubah pengalaman yang bersifat pribadi maupun kelompok
The authors examine the future of public service broadcasting in the context of current debates a... more The authors examine the future of public service broadcasting in the context of current debates about, and commercial pressures on, the BBC. They describe the European Community constraints on public service broadcasting and the needfor a clearer definition of such broadcasting, ...
Abstract The BBC is an exemplary institution in the government of culture. In the context of the ... more Abstract The BBC is an exemplary institution in the government of culture. In the context of the neo-liberalism of the 1990s it became also a key experimental site for the development of a new culture of government, one in which notions of markets, efficiency, accountability and ...
IN RECENT YEARS several writers have pursued the methodological similarities between the practice... more IN RECENT YEARS several writers have pursued the methodological similarities between the practices of ethnography and of psychoanalysis. They stress the use of concepts of transference and countertransference for understanding the experience of fieldwork and for analyzing ...
What would contemporary music scholarship look like if it was no longer imprinted with the discip... more What would contemporary music scholarship look like if it was no longer imprinted with the disciplinary assumptions, boundaries and divisions inherited from the last century? This article proposes that a generative model for future music studies would take the form of a relational musicology. The model is drawn from the author's work; but signs of an incipient relational musicology are found scattered across recent research in musicology, ethnomusicology, and jazz and popular music studies. In support of such a development, the article calls for a reconfiguration of the boundaries between the subdisciplines of music study – notably musicology, ethnomusicology, music sociology and popular music studies – so as to render problematic the music/social opposition and achieve a new interdisciplinary settlement, one that launches the study of music onto new epistemological and ontological terrain. In proposing this direction, the article points to the limits of the vision of interdisci...
This article sets out new methodological principles for the sociology of art, a sub-discipline th... more This article sets out new methodological principles for the sociology of art, a sub-discipline that it seeks to broaden conceptually by shifting the ground from art to cultural production. This shift suggests the utility of overcoming the boundaries that demarcate the sociology of art from adjacent fields, augmenting the sociological repertoire with reference to anthropology, cultural and media studies, art and cultural history, and the music disciplines. At the same time the article proposes that an explanatory theory of cultural production requires reinvention in relation to five key themes: aesthetics and the cultural object; agency and subjectivity; the place of institutions; history, temporality and change; and problems of value and judgement. The first half of the article approaches these issues through a sustained critique of Bourdieu. It proceeds through an exposition of generative research from contemporary anthropology, including the work of Alfred Gell, Christopher Pinney...
One of the most sustained criticisms of Bourdieu’s work is its poverty with respect to theorizing... more One of the most sustained criticisms of Bourdieu’s work is its poverty with respect to theorizing time, change, and history. In this light, this article traces out a series of novel paths in the analysis of temporality and history in relation to cultural production, informed by recent work in anthropology, social theory, and (less so) art history. The challenge of developing new perspectives on such matters does not arise solely from critiques of Bourdieu, but from wider recognition across the humanities of the problematic nature of prevailing forms of historicism, contextualization, and periodization. Several linked departures are proposed: the need to analyze the multiplicity of time in cultural production; the contributions of the art or cultural object––as a nonhuman actor––to the production of time in not one but several dimensions of temporality; and the importance of integrating such thinking into the theorization of history. Advancing beyond philosophical process theory, yet...
Free, downloadable copy of Improvisation and Social Aesthetics. Co-edited by Georgina Born, Eric... more Free, downloadable copy of Improvisation and Social Aesthetics. Co-edited by Georgina Born, Eric Lewis and Will Straw. Duke University Press, 2017.
How is time configured in processes of artistic and cultural production? And what does this tell ... more How is time configured in processes of artistic and cultural production? And what does this tell us about ideas of history, tradition, and imagination? This panel invites papers that theorise the multiple temporalities of creative practices across the arts, music, and cultural production.
From the project temporalities of freelance artistic labour, to the microsocial temporalities of performance, improvisation or studio practices, to the longue durée of cultural heritage traditions, variable forms of time and temporality are evoked and produced in processes of cultural production. Drawing on diverse ethnographic contexts, this panel expands on anthropological theorisations of time and transformation by drawing on fieldwork exploring the temporalities of artistic, musical, and cultural processes. We wish to highlight the need to analyse the multiplicity of conceptions and enactments of time in cultural processes, taking seriously the contributions of the arts and music to the production and theorization of time. Art and music have a dual quality: they are situated within ongoing historical processes, but they also produce time in diverse ways. Rather than dwelling on analyses of particular artistic practices and their ephemerality, or on conceptions of heritage and deep time, we aim to highlight how the study of multiple temporalities in artistic and cultural production can inform our understanding of history, tradition, and imagination more generally and feed back into core discussions in the anthropology of time and cultural history. We invite papers from any ethnographic context to address the following questions raised by theme 4 (transformation and time): How does time figure in imaginative and artistic processes? How are pasts and futures articulated through material and aesthetic practices? How are institutions involved in canonizing the past, preserving the present or promoting change? How can aesthetics be thought anew in relation to temporal processes?
Georgina Born, Professor of Music and Anthropology at Oxford University and Professorial Fellow o... more Georgina Born, Professor of Music and Anthropology at Oxford University and Professorial Fellow of Mansfield College, joins Vijay Iyer for an exchange of ideas traversing the arts, the humanities, and the social and natural sciences. The two musician-scholars each give a brief mini-lecture, Iyer on ‘Musicality’ and Born on ‘Musical Experience’, followed by a dialogue considering the intersections of these two concepts. [Podcast]
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become pronounced in the last decade, manifest in the dominance of a few key digital intermediaries and in the rapid capacity to establish primacy in new digital markets, disprove such assumptions. This chapter therefore advances the need for public intervention in digital media markets on several levels, each of them important, each founded on and drawing legitimacy from the expanded normative principles set out in Chapter 13.
become pronounced in the last decade, manifest in the dominance of a few key digital intermediaries and in the rapid capacity to establish primacy in new digital markets, disprove such assumptions. This chapter therefore advances the need for public intervention in digital media markets on several levels, each of them important, each founded on and drawing legitimacy from the expanded normative principles set out in Chapter 13.
From the project temporalities of freelance artistic labour, to the microsocial temporalities of performance, improvisation or studio practices, to the longue durée of cultural heritage traditions, variable forms of time and temporality are evoked and produced in processes of cultural production. Drawing on diverse ethnographic contexts, this panel expands on anthropological theorisations of time and transformation by drawing on fieldwork exploring the temporalities of artistic, musical, and cultural processes. We wish to highlight the need to analyse the multiplicity of conceptions and enactments of time in cultural processes, taking seriously the contributions of the arts and music to the production and theorization of time. Art and music have a dual quality: they are situated within ongoing historical processes, but they also produce time in diverse ways. Rather than dwelling on analyses of particular artistic practices and their ephemerality, or on conceptions of heritage and deep time, we aim to highlight how the study of multiple temporalities in artistic and cultural production can inform our understanding of history, tradition, and imagination more generally and feed back into core discussions in the anthropology of time and cultural history. We invite papers from any ethnographic context to address the following questions raised by theme 4 (transformation and time): How does time figure in imaginative and artistic processes? How are pasts and futures articulated through material and aesthetic practices? How are institutions involved in canonizing the past, preserving the present or promoting change? How can aesthetics be thought anew in relation to temporal processes?
Propose a paper: https://tinyurl.com/y9qt5nvs
Listen here: https://wigmore-hall.org.uk/podcasts/of-musicalities-and-musical-experience-vijay-iyer-and-georgina-born-in-conversation