:Music and Digital Media: A Planetary Anthropology

Abstract

Music and Digital Media is a groundbreaking update to our understandings of sound, media, digitization, and music. Truly transdisciplinary and transnational in scope, it innovates methodologically through new models for collaboration, multi-sited ethnography, and comparative work. It also offers an important defense of-and advancement of-theories of mediation.' -Jonathan Sterne, Communication Studies and Art History, McGill University 'This superb collection, with an authoritative overview as its introduction, represents the state of the art in studies of the digitalisation of music. It is also a testament to what anthropology at its reflexive best can offer the rest of the social sciences and humanities.' -David Hesmondhalgh, Media and Communication, University of Leeds 'Spanning continents and academic disciplines, the rich ethnographies contained in Music and Digital Media makes it obligatory reading for anyone wishing to understand the complex, contradictory, and momentous effects that digitization is having on musical cultures.'

Safeguarding Data

“…Whilst algorithms have been interrogated ethnographically in terms of their use in corporations (Seaver 2021), medicine (Ruckenstein and Schull 2017), the music industry (Born 2022), the platform economy (del Nido 2022; Timko and Van Melik 2021) and within national government projects such as India's Aadhar (Chaudhuri 2019;Nair 2019;Rao and Nair 2019), less consideration has been afforded to the reasons why local bureaucrats are reframing their work through algorithms and the kinds of ethical or moralistic discourses that underpin such a shift. If US technology professionals treat algorithms as 'traps' capable of capturing the attention of users (Seaver 2018), Argentinian citizens interpret the algorithms of new taxi services as indices of a political philosophy of freedom (del Nido 2022), and India's Aadhar has demanded a reinterrogation of what constitutes the individual in a country historically preoccupied with the politics of social structure (Nair 2021), what are the particular understandings of algorithms circulating within the setting of local government in the UK?…”