Jeremy Morris

University of Wisconsin-Madison, Communication Arts, Faculty Member

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I am currently an Assistant Professor in Media and Cultural Studies in the Communication Arts department at the University of Wisconsin Madison. I teach courses on the history of the Internet, new media and society, and podcasting. My research interests include the digitization of cultural goods and commodities, the transition from software to “apps”, and the current state of the popular music industries. My new book, Selling Digital Music, Formatting Culture (University of California Press) examines the transition from music on CDs to music on computers.
Supervisors: Jonathan Sterne
Address: Madison, Wisconsin
U.S.A.

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Eleanor Patterson

Auburn University

Christopher Cwynar

Trent University

Siobhan McHugh

University of Wollongong

Yoonmo Sang

Yonsei University

Kyle J. Miller

Kim Fox

American University in Cairo

Freja Sørine Adler Berg

Tiziano Bonini

University of Siena / Università di Siena

Arshdeep Chawla

University of Leeds

Tobias Wilinski

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Books by Jeremy Morris

Appified: Culture in the Age of Apps

Appified: Culture in the Age of Apps, 2018

Snapchat. WhatsApp. Ashley Madison. Fitbit. Tinder. Periscope. How do we make sense of how apps l... more Snapchat. WhatsApp. Ashley Madison. Fitbit. Tinder. Periscope. How do we make sense of how apps like these—and thousands of others—have embedded themselves into our daily routines, permeating the background of ordinary life and standing at-the-ready to be used on our smartphones and tablets? When we look at any single app, it’s hard to imagine how such a small piece of software could be particularly notable. But if we look at a collection of them, we see a bigger picture that reveals how the quotidian activities apps encompass are far from banal: connecting with friends (and strangers and enemies), sharing memories (and personally identifying information), making art (and trash), navigating spaces (and reshaping places in the process). While the sheer number of apps is overwhelming, as are the range of activities they address, each one offers an opportunity for us to seek out meaning in the mundane. Appified is the first scholarly volume to examine individual apps within the wider historical and cultural context of media and cultural studies scholarship, attuned to issues of politics and power, identity and the everyday.

Selling Digital Music, Formatting Culture

Selling Digital Music, Formatting Culture documents the transition of recorded music on CDs to mu... more Selling Digital Music, Formatting Culture documents the transition of recorded music on CDs to music as digital files on computers. More than two decades after the first digital music files began circulating in online archives and playing through new software media players, we have yet to fully internalize the cultural and aesthetic consequences of these shifts. Tracing the emergence of what Jeremy Wade Morris calls the “digital music commodity,” Selling Digital Music, Formatting Culture considers how a conflicted assemblage of technologies, users, and industries helped reformat popular music’s meanings and uses. Through case studies of five key technologies—Winamp, metadata, Napster, iTunes, and cloud computing—this book explores how music listeners gradually came to understand computers and digital files as suitable replacements for their stereos and CD. Morris connects industrial production, popular culture, technology, and commerce in a narrative involving the aesthetics of music and computers, and the labor of producers and everyday users, as well as the value that listeners make and take from digital objects and cultural goods. Above all, Selling Digital Music, Formatting Culture is a sounding out of music’s encounters with the interfaces, metadata, and algorithms of digital culture and of why the shifting form of the music commodity matters for the music and other media we love.

Papers by Jeremy Morris

PodcastRE Analytics: Using RSS to Study the Cultures and Norms of Podcasting

Digit. Humanit. Q., 2021

Over the past decade, podcasting has grown into one of the most important media forms in the worl... more Over the past decade, podcasting has grown into one of the most important media forms in the world. This article argues that podcasting’s unique technical affordances — particularly RSS feeds and user-entered metadata — open up productive methods for exploring the cultural practices and meanings of the medium. We share three different methods for studying RSS feeds and podcast metadata: 1) visualizing how topics and keywords trend over time; 2) visualizing networks of commonly associated keywords entered by podcasters; and 3) analyzing norms and common practices for the duration of podcasts (as a time-based media format, podcasting is unusual in that it is not bound by the programming schedules and technical limitations that provide strict parameters for most audiovisual forms). The methods and preliminary results reveal how metadata can function as a surrogate for studying large collections of time-based media objects. Yet our study also shows that, when it comes to born digital me...

Jeremy Morris

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