University of California Irvine Week 10 Media Capitals & Media Production Discussion Week 10 Worksheet – Curtin 1. What is ‘the reverse flow of media’? Do

University of California Irvine Week 10 Media Capitals & Media Production Discussion Week 10 Worksheet – Curtin

1. What is ‘the reverse flow of media’? Does it account for the entirety of global media flows?

2. What is the logic of accumulation? How does it contribute to creating media capitals?

3. What are trajectories of creative migration? How do they operate today differently than in the past?

4. How does sociocultural variation factor into the existence of several media capitals? How is regulation a part of this variation?

5. How can policy help to support new media capitals?

Week 10 Worksheet – Final

1. Stuart Hall introduced us to the idea of the dominant-hegemonic culture. Pick two authors we have read this quarter. What factors would they would argue contribute to this concept?

2. Adorno and Horkheimer introduced the concept of the culture industry. How do Oli Mould’s and Michael Curtin’s ideas complicate their conception of the culture industry?

3. Jonathan Sterne argued that Mp3’s are cultural artifacts. Yet Benjamin argued that mechanically reproduced objects have no aura. Can we reconcile these two views? Why or why not?

4. How have debates about digital media fallen into the trap of technological determinism? What might two of the scholars we have read argue instead about the role of this technology in society? (Pick any two scholars we read.)

5. How do media workers fit into the theories of Caldwell, Mould, and Curtin? How can their ideas be useful for those of you thinking about becoming media workers yourself? …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
new media & society
Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi
Vol8(5):825–842 [DOI: 10.1177/1461444806067737]
ARTICLE
The mp3 as cultural
artifact
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
JONATHAN STERNE
McGill University, Canada
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Abstract
The mp3 lies at the center of important debates around
intellectual property and file-sharing, but it is also a
cultural artifact in its own right. This article examines the
design of the mp3 from both industrial and psychoacoustic
perspectives to explain better why mp3s are so easy to
exchange and the auditory dimensions of that process of
exchange. As a container technology for recorded sound,
the mp3 shows that the quality of ‘portability’ is central to
the history of auditory representation. As a psychoacoustic
technology that literally plays its listeners, the mp3 shows
that digital audio culture works according to logics
somewhat distinct from digital visual culture.
Key words
digital audio • digital format • file-sharing • listening •
mp3 • psychoacoustics • sound • sound recording •
technology and culture • visual culture
For the last seven years or so, the mp3 has occupied center stage in the
world of digital audio formats. It has been the subject of academic papers,
court cases, congressional and parliamentary hearings and countless magazine
and newspaper articles. Mp3 trading has been the case in point in a major
international controversy over the status of intellectual property, copyright
and the economics of entertainment. A whole series of authors have argued
that the debate over intellectual property is incredibly important for
intellectuals, academics, artists and anyone else who works with ideas (see
e.g. Bettig, 1997; Burkart and McCourt, 2004; Jones, 2000; Lessig, 2000,
2002; McCourt and Burkart, 2003; McLeod, 2001, 2005). Writings on
825
New Media & Society 8(5)
mp3s and file-sharing almost uniformly sound a note of crisis, as if the
battle over mp3s and intellectual property is the most important cultural
conflict of our time.
Therefore, it is surprising how little of the common sense of technology
studies has been applied to mp3s. Scholars in a range of fields – philosophy
of technology, science and technology studies and the cultural study of
technology – have all advocated the study of technologies as artifacts.
Philosopher Langdon Winner writes that technological artifacts ‘embody
specific forms of power and authority’ (1986: 19). He groups the politics of
technologies into two main categories: ‘instances in which the invention,
design, or arrangement of a specific technical device or system becomes a
way of settling an issue in the affairs of a political community’, and
‘“inherently political technologies”, man-made systems that appear to
require or be strongly compatible with particular kinds of political
relationships’ (1986: 22). In Winner’s heuristic, the mp3 partakes of both
categories: it originated as an attempt to solve the problem of exchangeable
formats across segments of the media industry and it may require particular
social and cultural systems of both intellectual property and listening.
The mp3 is an artifact in another sense. The mp3 is a crystallized set of
social and material relations. It is an item that ‘works for’ and is ‘worked on’
by a host of people, ideologies, technologies and other social and material
elements. Writers in the social construction of technology and actor–
network theory traditions (e.g. Bijker, 1995; Latour, 1996; Pinch and Bijker,
1984) have focused on the relation of human and non-human actors in the
construction of technologies, showing how technologies come together
from what one might consider otherwise as disparate elements. Cultural
studies of technology have been more concerned with broader accounts of
social context and stratified social power as they shape technologies and as
technologies are implicated in these contexts (see e.g. Slack, 1984; Stabile,
1994; Wise, 1997). But all these approaches point to the artifactual nature of
technologies such as the mp3. They urge us to consider it as a result of
social and technical processes, rather than as outside them somehow.
Uncovering that process is not simply a matter of showing the artificiality or
‘constructedness’ of the mp3, although that is part of the project. This
article will use the mp3 as a tour guide for social, physical, psychological
and ideological phenomena of which otherwise we might not have been
fully aware. It will consider the mp3 as an artifact shaped by several
electronics industries, the recoding industry and actual and idealized
practices of listening.
Of course, this is not the first cultural study of mp3s. Kembrew McLeod
(2005) notes that because the mp3 format is software, its uses are somewhat
less determined than hardware and, even there, uses can change. Steve Jones
(2002) has argued cleverly that the mp3 is an occasion to bring questions of
826
Sterne: The mp3 as cultural artefact
distribution to the forefront of cultural studies. Yet in most accounts, writers
still represent the mp3 itself as a mute, inert object that ‘impacts’ an
industry, a social environment or a legal system. The writing on the subject
most often takes the form of the mp3 as either ‘given’ or obvious, with little
further thought on the matter required for addressing real legal and
economic issues. At the same time, surprisingly little discussion has occurred
around the aesthetic dimensions of mp3s, whether by that one means the
experience of mp3 listening, the sound of mp3s themselves or the meanings
that the form of the mp3 might take. Discussions of the sound of mp3s
have been limited largely to audio engineers and audiophiles, who range
from dismissals on the basis that mp3s sound ‘bad’ (e.g. Atkinson, 1999) to
analyses of the sonic limitations of mp3s as a ‘problem’ (e.g. Eide, 2001). In
the academic world, one could read for a long time before confronting the
fact that mp3s are sound files. Yet to note an absence is not enough. After
all, if the substantial dimensions of ‘the mp3 question’ are law and
economics, one might reasonably assume that concerns about the mp3 ‘as
technological form’ and sonic object take a back seat.
This article advances an alternate position. A robust understanding of the
technological and aesthetic dimensions of the mp3 provides an important
context for discussions of the legal, political economic and broader cultural
dimensions of file-sharing. By examining the mp3 as an auditory
technology, it reveals some important dimensions of the relationship
between the so-called ‘new’ media1 and the human body that have been
neglected largely by scholars who privilege the visual dimensions of new
media. In short, it will show that a gestural, tactile form of embodiment is
the requirement and result of digital audio. This contrasts greatly with the
mentalist and self-conscious disembodiment that some scholars still describe
as a central feature of virtual space.
To borrow a term from Lewis Mumford, the mp3 is a ‘container
technology’. Mumford wrote that technology scholars’ emphasis on tools
over containers ‘overlooks’ their equally vital role (see Mumford, 1959,
1966). He postulated that one reason why container technologies are
neglected often in the history and philosophy of technology is that usually,
they are coded as feminine. While gender coding may be a bit dated,
Mumford did have a point about activity and passivity, which are still often
gender coded. More recently, feminist scholar Zoë Sofia (2000) has picked
up Mumford’s thread. While she qualifies Mumford’s argument – that
container technologies may be as connected with men as with women –
they are still metaphorized often as feminine. But Sofia argues that the
misogyny story is only part of the explanation for the neglect of container
technologies: ‘to keep utensils, apparatus and utilities2 in mind is difficult
because these kinds of technological objects are designed to be unobtrusive
and . . . make their presence felt, but not noticed’ (2000: 188). Indeed, this
827
New Media & Society 8(5)
is the mode in which mp3s work: they are important precisely because they
are useful but do not call attention to themselves in practice. They take up
less space than other kinds of digital recordings and when they are listened
to, they are experienced as music, not as file formats. Thus, we should not
be surprised to find media among Sofia’s many examples of container
technologies.
The rest of this article explores the mp3 as a container technology for
sound recordings. Mumford and Sofia both use the term ‘apparatus’ to
describe a container that transforms as it holds (Sofia, 2000). The mp3
clearly belongs to this category, but it differs in one important way: it is a
container for containers. Like an oven that holds a casserole and transforms
its contents, the mp3 is a holder for sound recordings. It is a media
technology designed to make use of other media technologies. As we will
see below, the transformations effected by mp3 encoding are themselves
heavily-directed cultural practices. Mp3s contain within them a whole
philosophy of audition and a praxeology of listening. As a philosophy of
audition, the mp3 makes use of the limitations of healthy human hearing.
One might even say that the mp3 is a celebration of the limits of auditory
perception. The anticipated praxeology of listening encoded in each mp3
emphasizes distraction over attention and exchange over use. If that were
not enough, the technology itself is perfectly and lovingly shaped for the
very purposes to which it is not supposed to be put: the mp3 is perfectly
designed for illegal file-sharing. Thus, the next section explains the form of
the mp3 and what makes it different from other kinds of recording
technologies and then offers an analysis of the mp3 as a cultural artifact.
THE SUPPLY OF MP3s
The point of mp3s is to make audio files smaller through data compression3
so that they are easier to exchange in a limited bandwidth environment such
as the internet, and easier to store in a limited dataspace environment, such
as a hard drive. This section discusses the reasons why a consortium of
communication industries built the mp3 to be so portable. Then it explains
the psychoacoustic dimensions of mp3s, which are the crucial technical and
cultural components of their portability. In short, the mp3 was designed by
an electronics industry interested in maximum compatibility across
platforms, which would allow for easy exchange of files. At the same time,
the mp3 uses a specific form of data compression based on a model of how
the human ear works. Therefore it is a machine designed to anticipate how
its listeners perceive music and to perceive for them. Both explanations are a
bit ‘gear-headed’, but like the ‘detour through theory’ so central to good
cultural studies writing (Hall, 1992: 283), this ‘detour through technology’
will help us to reconstitute our object of study and thereby gain new
insights into hitherto hidden auditory dimensions of digital media culture.
828
Sterne: The mp3 as cultural artefact
MP3 stands for MPEG-1, Layer-3. MPEG (Motion Picture Experts
Group) is a consortium of engineers and others formed with the support of
the International Standards Organization (ISO) and the International
Electrotechnical Commission.4 MPEG started out in 1988 as an ad hoc
group that aimed to standardize data compression schemes in the broadcast,
telecommunications and consumer electronics industries. In collaboration
with academics, all of the big corporate players had a role and an interest,
even as internal divisions within corporations sometimes led them to create
proprietary standards while supporting research on standardized compression.
For those who believed in standardization, one format was needed that
could cut across digital technologies as diverse as compact discs, digital
video, high-definition television, teleconferencing and satellite
communications, to name just a few of the disparate industries interested in
a shared standard (Mitchell et al., 1997).5 The MPEG-1 standard is broken
down into five ‘parts’: part 1 deals with systems aspects; part 2 with video;
part 3 with audio compression; part 4 with compliance testing; and part 5
with software implementation (Mitchell et al., 1997). But the mp3 does not
stand for the third part, it stands for the third layer of audio coding in the
MPEG standard. So, mp3 is really layer 3 of part 3 of the MPEG standard.
(This level of detail is offered to make a point: the audio dimension of the
MPEG standard was, at the outset, a very local concern – a piece of a larger
project which aimed to standardize compression across all forms of digital
media.)
To borrow another phrase from Zoë Sofia, the MPEG standard carried
with it a certain ‘logic of resourcing and supply’ (2000: 195–6). The logic
was this: once standardized, data could be moved with ease and grace across
many different kinds of systems and over great distances frequently and with
little effort. This was the dream of the Motion Picture Experts Group and
its many benefactors. If one is looking for the cultural origins of the
promiscuity among illegal file-sharers, one need look no further than this
founding moment. The possibility for quick and easy transfers, anonymous
relations between provider and receiver, cross-platform compatibility,
stockpiling and easy storage and access – all were built into the MPEG form
itself long before the age of Napster, Gnutella, Hotline, iTunes and Rio.
Attempts to commercialize the mp3 and its likely successor, Advanced
Audio Coding (AAC), make use of various digital rights management
algorithms that make it more difficult to share files. For instance, Apple’s
iTunes Music Store and RealNetworks use incompatible technologies to
prevent sharing. These recent innovations do mark a recognition on the part
of the industry that the compatibility of the mp3 is part of the reason why
it is so widely shared. But the net result of such practices is to require users
who legally purchase mp3s from iTunes and RealNetworks to use two
separate programs for playback. As Patrick Burkart and Tom McCourt
829
New Media & Society 8(5)
(2004) argue, digital rights management is hampered by vast
incompatibilities across software and hardware and an industry climate
hostile to a shared standard. In other words, it is probably easier to install a
Gnutella client and acquire illegal files than it is to manage two separate
mp3 collections and two separate playback programs.
Through its design as a portable container technology, the mp3 has been
ascribed the status of a thing in everyday practice, even though it is nothing
more than a format for encoding digital data. Both listeners and companies
that sell mp3s (or the equipment to play them) readily talk of mp3
collections analogously to record collections or book collections. Articles on
the original incarnation of Napster, for example, tended to describe it as a
‘program for searching other people’s mp3 collections’ (e.g. McCollum,
2000; Wood and Jenish, 2000). More recently, magazine advertisements for
Apple’s iPod and iPod Mini extol their virtues by listing the number of
‘songs’ that each device can hold (Apple, 2004). Further, mp3s have been
objectified as articles of intellectual property in the US legal system,
Canadian legislature and in several other countries as well (Evangelista,
2003; Krim, 2003; Lazin, 2003).
This raises the problem of use-value and exchange-value. Use-value, first
identified by John Locke (1692) and elaborated by Karl Marx and others, is
a perspective on value which treats commodities in terms of their actual
utility. Exchange-value, meanwhile, is the market value of a commodity.
While this would appear to be an arbitrary relationship, Marx argues –
following Adam Smith – that exchange-value is actually based on the labor
required to make the commodity, once that labor is exchanged for money
which in turn can be traded for the commodity (Marx, 1967[1867]; Smith,
1993[1776]). Thus, we have a bifurcation of value: use-value, which is about
the work of expenditure; and exchange-value, which is about the work of
creation. Most interesting for our purposes is the relationship of exchangevalue to music. In his romantic and polemical book on music, Jacques Attali
argues that sound recording occasions a shift from use-value to exchangevalue in music:
We must not forget that music remains a very unique commodity; to take on
meaning, it requires an incompressible lapse of time, that of its own duration.
Thus the gramophone, conceived as a recorder to stockpile time, became
instead its principle user. Conceived as a word preserver, it became a sound
diffuser. The major contradiction of repetition is evident here: people must devote
their time to producing the means to buy recordings of other people’s time, losing in the
process not only the use of their time, but also the time required to use other
people’s time. Stockpiling thus becomes a substitute, not a preliminary
condition, for use. People buy more records than they can listen to. They stockpile
what they want to find the time to hear. Use-time and exchange-time destroy one
another. (Attali, 1985: 101; emphasis in original)
830
Sterne: The mp3 as cultural artefact
One can see the problem immediately with mp3s in Attali’s formulation:
usually, people do not buy them. Attali argues that recording substitutes
exchange-value for use-value because people do not have the time to listen
to all of the recordings that they may buy. Yet compared to the number of
mp3s freely given and received through file-sharing, few meet the basic
definition of exchange-value: they are not paid for and therefore do not
require as much labor (in exchange for a wage or salary) to procure.
Further, the exchange itself does not deprive the original owner of the file’s
use. The peculiar status of the mp3 as a valued cultural object which can
circulate outside the channels of the value economy is one of the
fundamental, enabling conditions for the intellectual property debates that
surround it. Epochal proclamations are tempting when confronted with this
state of affairs: one could say that if recording shifted music from use-value
to exchange-value, then digitization in the form of the mp3 liberates
recorded music from the economics of value by enabling its free, easy and
large-scale exchange.
In use, mp3s can seem a bit like mollusks without their shells – recorded
music without the commodity form – since generally they are not
exchanged for money. One response to this condition would be to consider
the internet as a gift economy, as Richard Barbrook (1998) has done so
elegantly and provocatively. But if the mp3s are mollusks free of their shells,
they still need air and water: listeners must still pay for the descendents of
the gramophone and the record dealer: computers, speakers, internet
connections (or membership in institutions such as universities that provide
access to su…
Purchase answer to see full
attachment