CDCS Colloquium: Lucy March

The event will be at the Annenberg School for Communication (3620 Walnut St) Room 300

Colloquium description:

Things can get a little weird when you’re online.

In a “postdigital” age, the ubiquitousness of the Internet and other digital technologies arguably means that Internet users are increasingly using popular media to make sense of our relationships with these technologies (Mazierska et al., 2018), while more of our cultural referents emerge from digital environments. These referents are easily borrowed, mashed, and mixed up by users with varied means of technological expertise and accessibility, as the lines between production and consumption become blurred, and digital anonymity obscures power dynamics scholars have previously used to make sense of the politics of identity and representation. Music as a representational medium helps us make sense of not only the individual self, but the self as part of a particular place, time, or social group; it places us in imaginative cultural narratives (Frith, 2007), making it a rich medium through which to interrogate these patterns of digital media production and circulation.

This talk explores some of the weirder corners of the musical Internet, and presents March’s framework for the phenomenon of “Internet music,” resulting from deep ethnographic immersion in, and textual/discursive analyses of three Internet music genres (all of which you may have never heard of): vaporwave, hyperpop, and phonk. It interrogates how representations of racial, gender, and sexual identity are negotiated by both producers and fans of these musics, and explores how corporately-owned platforms like YouTube and Spotify have simultaneously shaped and co-opted Internet music sounds and paratexts. This talk will situate these musics as exemplars for understanding cultural evolution and spread in the digital age, with serious consequences for how we spend time online.

March will also discuss the implications of her broader research agenda on music and digital culture, and show how figures from virtual musician Hatsune Miku to YouTube music critic Anthony Fantano are shaping the cultural landscape.

Host or Publisher CDCS