Mixing It: Digital Ethnography and Online Research Methods--A Tale of Two Global Digital Music Genres (original) (raw)

Digital ethnography has a double meaning, referring both to the ethnographic study of digital cultures and to the development of digital methodologies to enhance anthropological, ethnographic and related interdisciplinary research. In this paper we combine the two. We offer a critical and reflexive introduction to novel internet-based methodologies that complement offline ethnographic research. Our aim is to show the powers of such methodologies and how they can be used to supplement other sources of ethnographic insight. The chapter’s ethnographic focus is on two digital music cultures, both of which make significant use of the internet: Vaporwave, a contemporary genre, and Microsound, an established and long-standing one. By comparing the two genres, and analysing their online practices, we show how they represent distinctive moments in the evolution of the internet as a digital-cultural medium. We therefore contend that digital methodologies oriented to our actors’ uses of the internet must be attuned to its cultural and historical variation: to the internet itself as a cultural form, and its changing contributions to such digital-music assemblages. Methodologically, we adapt tools developed previously for Actor Network Theory: the issue crawler software (http://www.govcom.org/Issuecrawler\_instructions.htm). Brought to digital music genres, these tools analyse the exchange of hyperlinks amongst actors online, mapping, visualising and making available for further analysis relations among some of the many entities––labels, platforms, venues, festivals, funding bodies, distributors, critics, bloggers, fans, co-artists, allies––that mediate, and are mobilised by, such genres. Coupled with analysis of the two genres’ offline social and cultural formations, and supported by qualitative insights from genre theory and media aesthetics, such network visualisations offer ways of significantly deepening the analysis of genres with online emanations. Yet, importantly, adequate interpretation of the network visualisations demand that they are combined them with other sources of ethnographic knowledge. Use of these tools, combined with the methodological principles we set out, can be transposed, we contend, into many spheres of ethnographic enquiry where cultural scenes and practices combine offline and online manifestations. At the outset, we analyse the distinctive ways in which uses of the internet enter into the aesthetic and communicative practices of Vaporwave and Microsound. We proceed to analyse the temporality of these practices––including the temporality of the web; through the case of Microsound, we trace the beginnings of the migration of electronic music cultures online in the mid-late 1990s, and through Vaporwave, we examine very current, transmedial aesthetic uses of the internet. Together, the two demonstrate how the web is employed, with various levels of emphasis, in several ways: 1) to circulate music in the form of text, recordings, and objects; 2) to cultivate, publicise and distribute knowledge and facilitate discussion, via blogs, mailing lists and fora; 3) to accumulate, and accelerate the accumulation of, cultural capital through the creation and exchange of symbolic, semiotic and material links; and 4) as an expressive and aesthetic medium, part of a genre’s larger transmedial aesthetic assemblage. Indeed, in the case of Vaporwave, the internet acts as a rudimentary content creator, providing––in the guise of recycled web content––the substantive material through which the music is realised. Our comparative analysis of Microsound and Vaporwave affords insights into the historicity of the web, showing how online communities and digitally-native practices have developed from ‘wide’, open, and often anonymous social networks to more ‘local’ and intimate communities that, in their small scale, seek to mimic or replicate ‘offline’, co-present musical socialities. In the case of Vaporwave, this historicity enters into the very aesthetics of the genre, as artists and other actors engage in knowing, postmodern play with the signifiers of the early days of web 2.0.