Jeremy Morris

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 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.

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...

Mobile applications for downloading podcasts to smartphones and tablets, or podcatcher apps, are some of the most plentiful in various digital software application stores (app stores). The software features, interfaces, and options podcatchers make available give digital soundworks new functionality, materiality, visuality, and aurality. By collecting and analyzing some of the most popular podcasting applications, this article surveys the affordances and restrictions promoted by podcatching app interfaces. Our research explores how podcast apps promote new instances of listening, arguing that podcatchers reconfigure relationships between listeners and producers, and are also ultimately people-catchers that attempt to aggregate listeners in a fragmented media environment by increasing sonic interactivity, encouraging ubiquitous listening, curating and packaging podcasts as visual media, and emphasizing social features that allow users to share podcasts with each other.

Drawing on Mark Katz’s notion of phonographic effects—where musicians, during the advent of early recording technology, altered their style of play to be better captured by microphones—this article explores some of the “platform effects” that arise in the shift to platformization and how cultural goods and user practices are re-formatted in the process. In particular, I examine the case of the music streaming service Spotify to think through the variety of means, sonic, and otherwise, that artists, labels, and other platform stakeholders use to “optimize” music to respond to the pressures platformization creates. I develop a typology of strategies—sonic optimization, data optimization, and infrastructural optimization—to consider the creative and logistical challenges optimization poses for platforms, artists, and users alike. From creating playlist friendly songs to musical spam to artificial play counts, I use the blurry lines these cases create to explore the tensions between the...

At first glance apps do seem rather trivial. They are abundant, cheap, or free and often serve limited functions. They can have a rapid rise from obscurity to overnight success, but they fade quickly as different apps emerge, tastes change, or as operating systems update and force obsolescence. Most apps are built to solve mundane, everyday problems: keeping track of one’s schedule, waking up, remembering the milk, taking notes, planning workouts. But the quotidian activities they influence and encompass are far from banal: connecting with friends (and strangers), sharing memories (and personally identifying information), making art (and trash), navigating spaces (and reshaping places in the process). Although the sheer number of apps may be overwhelming, as are the range of activities they address, each one offers an opportunity for media and cultural studies scholars to seek out meaning in the mundane. Rather than treat apps as frivolous or incidental, what in- sights reveal themselves if we take apps seriously, as a specific manifestation of software, as a vector for popular culture, and as a particular aesthetic and functional presentation of code that has expanded the market for software and further integrated it into leisure, commercial, educational, interpersonal, and other spheres of everyday activity?

If it didn’t tell us so much about the political economy of app stores and the evolving nature of the software commodity, Is It Tuesday? would be little more than an entertaining punch line—an obscure side note in a sea of mundane software. But like other seemingly trivial software, the app’s existence, reception, and features highlight precisely what’s “new” about delivering software as an easily consumable, mobile, and mundane commodity through app stores that are shaped by ratings, reviews, and other algorithms.

Despite its rich sonic past, histories of the Web generally focus on the visual; we track website snapshots over time with tools like the Wayback Machine, focus on different eras of web design styles like Web 2.0 or flat design and praise the Web’s visual technical innovations. What if we amplified this knowledge of the Web’s visual and technical history by listening to it as well? Accordingly, this chapter explores some of the Web’s sonic past by considering technologies that made sound playable on the Web and some of the early communities that formed around new modes of music distribution.

Automated recommendation systems now occupy a central position in the circulation of media and cultural products. Using music as a test case, this article examines the use of algorithms and data mining techniques for the presentation and representation of culture, and how these tools reconfigure the process of cultural intermediation. Expanding Bourdieu’s notion of cultural intermediaries to include technologies like algorithms, I argue that an emerging layer of companies – call them infomediaries – are increasingly responsible for shaping how audiences encounter and experience cultural content. Through a critical analysis of The Echo Nest, a music infomediary whose databases underpin many digital music services, I trace the shift from intermediation to infomediation and explore what is at stake at the intersection of data mining, taste making and audience manufacture. The new infomediary logics at work are computational forms of power that shape popular culture and highlight the social implications of curation by code.

Over a decade after Napster’s introduction, file sharing programs still shoulder much of the blame for music and other media’s declining sales. Although labels and industry associations point their fingers at the harm digital piracy and file-sharing cause, they are less likely to admit the extent to which these anti-markets inform everyday decisions. File-sharing technologies create networks of users that serve as profitable data for ratings and metrics agencies. Using a case study of BigChampagne and its relationship to Napster, this article considers how the look, structure, and function of file-sharing software helped turn an economically threatening community into a commodity and how piracy’s disruptive potential is always in tension with processes of commodification.

This paper investigates the rise of cloud computing, specifically for music. More than just new technologies for distribution, cloud services establish a fundamentally different relationship between listeners and their music. As the metaphor suggests, the cloud offers an infinite space where music is ever available, but cloud services also act as transient and enclosed spaces where the music we “own” is always at an ethereal distance. Cloud–based music services represent a particular cultural model of music distribution — one that enmeshes users in a network of technologies and a process of continual commodification.

This dissertation concentrates on the changing form of the music commodity over the last two decades. Specifically, it traces the transition from music on compact discs to music as a digital file on computers/mobile devices and the economic, industrial, aesthetic and cultural consequences this shift has for how we produce, present, and consume music. As computers became viable sources for the playback of popular music in the 1980s and 1990s, the roots of the digital music commodity took hold. Stripped of many of their previous attributes (i.e. album art, compressed sound, packaging, etc.), recordings as digital files were initially decontextualized commodities. On computers, music underwent an interface-lift, gradually getting redressed with new features (i.e. metadata, interfaces, digital “packaging”). This dissertation focuses on five technologies – Winamp, Metadata, Napster, iTunes and Cloud Computing – that were key to rehabilitating the music commodity in its digital environments. These technologies and the cultural practices that accompanied them gave music new paratexts and micromaterials that ultimately constituted the digital music commodity. Through case studies, archival research, and descriptive analysis, this study makes methodological and intellectual contributions to the field of communication and technology studies as well as to studies of new media and the cultural industries. By teasing out the differences between the commodity aspects of the CD and the digital file, this project offers fresh perspectives on materiality, aesthetics, labour and ownership in an era of digital goods. Digital music’s fluid and ubiquitous nature seems to subvert those who seek to profit from it. But while digital music offers the potential to disrupt the traditional ways of doing business in music, it also affords new forms of control and power. This has not stopped artists, hobbyists and users from carrying out creative experiments that call into question the codes and conventions of the digital music commodity. In doing so, they make visible the promise of digital music: to turn our attention to the commodification process and to force a reconsideration of the role music plays in the contemporary moment.

On the surface, the Line 6 DL4 Digital Delay Modeler seems similar to other guitar delay pedals. Sounds fed into the device repeat in time and space; the repetitions recur in stereo at varying speeds depending on how the user manipulates the control dials. However, it is the presence of one specific effect, what the manufacturer (Line 6) calls the “Loop Sampler”, which raises questions about the intersection of sound, body, and technology. Using the Loop Sampler, users trigger an on/off switch to record sounds. Once users record a phrase (loop), they can play it back and add additional sounds (overdubs) to it. The loops repeat endlessly, though they decay slowly as additional noises enter the mix. The design of the pedal is such that this can all be done during a live performance.

As machines like the DL4 become increasingly efficient at immediately repeating live loops, new practices of performance evolve and new conceptions of the interaction between musicians, machines, and sounds emerge. Drawing on Bruno Latour’s view of technologies as nonhuman social actors, I use the case of the DL4 to explore how musicians and the DL4 play in concert as partners in music creation. The device amplifies behaviours, musical and physical, that affect the user’s body, their musical practice, and sound itself. By creating loops and “delegating the live” to the DL4, performers using the pedal foreground the musical importance of repetition and trouble the relationship between live performance and recorded mediation. Far from a mundane technical object, the DL4 is a key figure in the network of interactions that constitute musical performances.

Hailed as a revolutionary new transmission technology in 2005, podcasting has to date received relatively little scholarly attention. This essay sets out some basic points of departure for critical analysis of the phenomenon by considering some key aspects of podcasting’s short history. We first analyse the origins and emergence of the word podcasting among the press and the digerati. We dispute the standard argument that podcasting’s main innovation is a marriage of RSS and Apple’s iPod by presenting podcasting as a practice that arose from a network of actors, technologies and behaviours. In the second section, we discuss how podcasting works and why we need to look beyond distribution to understand its historical emergence. In the third section of the essay, we connect podcasting with the development of affordable and easy-to-use consumer audio production software and hardware, technologies that are necessary (though not sufficient) preconditions for podcasting to offer greater access for audiences and producers than traditional models of broadcasting. We conclude by examining the implicit contrast between “podcasting” and “broadcasting” in order to trouble the commonsensical definition of broadcasting and thereby reopen some basic questions about who is entitled to communicate and by which techniques. While podcasting is neither a complete break from broadcasting nor part of any kind of revolution, it is the realisation of an alternate cultural model of broadcasting. The practice of podcasting thus offers us an opportunity to rethink the connections between broadcasting and other kinds of media practices and to re-examine the political and cultural questions broadcasting presents.

Full citation:
Sterne, J. S., Morris, J. W., Baker, M. B., Moscote-Frere, A. (2008) “The Politics of Podcasting.” Fiberculture. 12(1). Available at http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue13/issue13_sterne.html