The New Economy of Attention

I started out a recent speech by noting the ways in which fandom has changed since the advent of social media, saying:

These are interesting times for reception theorists, especially those that study fandom. Fandom represents an extra-ordinary form of audiencing, including everything from emotional attachment to performers to obsessive collecting. However, the nature of fandom’s extra-ordinariness has changed a great deal in the past several decades thanks to the advent of the Internet and digital production. It seems today that previously “abnormal” fan practices have not only become more and more accepted but also explicitly supported and nurtured by new technologies and re-framed by niche marketing. Simply: we live in an age in which “following” a stranger because you “like” them is not creepy, but rather represents a harmless form of networking. As Twitter encourages us, "Follow your interests."

I didn't say much more than that about fandom's current trajectory, veering instead into a consideration of this change for those of us interested in writing fandom's history. However, a recent article by Esther Dyson, "Attention Must Be Paid," has made me think again about just how social media has changed the value system behind what we call "fandom."

I thought Dyson's essay, subtitled, "How the Internet is Changing How People Listen," was going to be an analysis of listening in the 21st century, one of my favorite topics, but it turned out to be an outline of how companies might commodify attention in the digital age. The paragraph that made me sit up a little straighter was:

The Internet is changing the economics of attention by fostering peer-to-peer interactions. People used to pay attention to those around them and to "stars." Now, they spend lots of time online paying attention to people they haven't met. And, increasingly, individuals go online to get attention, not to give it. Accordingly, companies need to learn how to give customers the attention that they crave, rather than demanding customers' attention and then charging them extra for the attention that their brand commands.

I relied on rather old categories of "normal/abnormal" in thinking about the re-framing of fandom on Facebook and Twitter. Dyson, however, suggests something even more subversive than the mere acceptance of fannish attention: she's saying that the economy of attention has changed so that what is commodified is not the cultural performance, event, or product to which one might attend but rather the very act of attending. In other words, in the world of social media, fans and fandom have become products; fans consume each other, with stars and cultural producers playing a supporting role.

Yow. This reminds me of late 18th and early 19th century opera and musical theater in the U.S., when people went to performances to see and be seen, and what happened "on stage" was secondary. Maybe cultural behavior in our society has come full circle. Except this time, of course, there are companies ready to "monetize" it all. We'll see.

Storing All That Sheet Music

Orchard House, Concord, Massachusetts: Dining Room. (The rack is on left).

On a recent visit with my family to Orchard House, the home of Louisa May Alcott, I noticed a curious piece of furniture in the corner of the dining room that look a bit like an oversized dish-drying rack; it was a finely-finished platform, on bowed legs, topped with a frame intersected by large vertical slots. After the guide suggested that it might have held sheet music, I became curious about "sheet music furniture." Was there such a thing? How far did people go to organize their home sheet music collections in the 19th century? 

This may seem like a bizarre topic to research, but in the age of the memory chip, we have a weakened understanding of the extent to which collecting music before the 21st century required a good deal of physical space and material organization. Besides the piano, one of the most successful consumer products for music in the 19th century was sheet music. (In fact, they often went together: getting a piano invariably meant starting a sheet music collection). Music publishers offered diverse forms of music, including lesson books for instrument and voice, souvenir versions of songs from the musical stage, hymns, minstrel songs, simplified versions of operas and symphonies. An enthusiast's sheet music could quickly number into hundreds of pieces, requiring some sort of cataloguing system for retrieval. As one writer lamented, "We so frequently go into homes and find sheet music thrown about in all sorts of confusion. One family has on old square piano and beneath it is a disorderly heap." (Locomotive Firemen's Magazine, October 1899, 420). How people dealt with issues of storage, organization, and display said a lot about how they consumed, valued, and understood music in general.

Some music-lovers started by identifying their collection with book-plates, similar to those used in home libraries. Music book-plates, as Sheldon Cheney has explained, were often specially-designed to both indicate a person's idiosyncratic interests and to fit in the margins of sheet music pages. 

Many people paid to have their collections of sheet music bound in leather and personalized with their names embossed in gold on the covers. The binders purposefully indicated the individual preferences of their owners through variations in content and organization--by year, by style, by publisher, and by favorite pieces. they could be bulky, but when stored with other books in one's library shelf, they added a sense of refinement and personal achievement to the room.

iPod Culture and the History of Listening

Slate excerpted an essay from the journal n+1 this week, on the iPod and its historical meaning, by Nikil Saval. It caught my attention, especially since I just spent the past eight years writing a book (Listening and Longing, coming Fall 2011 from Wesleyan University Press) about music listening in the 19th century. Certainly, we live in a music culture in which listening has long had a distinct role, and in the past decade or so, that role appears to have become more visible. Have mp3 devices like the iPod changed us? How might we measure such a change?

Saval approaches the iPod from the perspective of social theory, something that’s clear from his statement that “in the 20th century, the two most considered attempts to connect music and society were those of the philosopher Theodor Adorno and the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.” No ethnomusicology, here--nor more recent sociological work by Tia DeNora or Michael Bull. While he rightly notes that Adorno avoided empirical evidence, and that Bourdieu failed to see how music pluralism might create its own kind of class hierarchy, these criticisms appear to be only a polite deference to skeptical readers; in the last instance, he agrees with Adorno (and Allan Bloom, for that matter): We live in “a counterfeit heaven where music plays all the time," but “we're not even listening.”

The judgments of social theory don’t involve actual people, which, I suppose, makes this sort of assertion safe from the messiness of accounting for experience. Nevermind that there are people on the street right now, to whom one could ask, “Why do you listen to your iPod so much?,” and from whom one would receive many considered and richly complex answers that may contradict the notion that people are “not even listening.”

My main criticism, however, is actually with the history presented in the essay. I very much appreciate Saval’s serious attention to the cultural behavior of music listening (something, as he points out, almost entirely absent from both academic and journalistic music criticism). And I am impressed with his emphasis on the fact that listening is always historical--that is, not a biological given but a complex set of interpretive moves on the part of listeners, which are themselves influenced by changing ideologies and institutions. But in his attempt to place iPod listening in that history, I would argue that he oversimplifies.

For Saval, it all comes down to Berliner’s Gramophone. In particular, he says, “Before the invention of the record and the gramophone (1887), the only form of listening people knew was social; the closest thing to a private musical experience was playing an instrument for yourself, or silently looking over a score. More often, if you had the means, you got to sit in the panopticon of the concert hall, seeing and being seen to the accompaniment of Verdi.” The gramophone, in his view, facilitated a new era of “solitary hyper-listening,” broken only by a brief and failed utopian moment in the 1960s, when  members of the counterculture believed that music could be a means to bring people together for social change.

This is not a new historical formulation; the advent of sound recording figures as a significant epochal dividing line in most textbooks on communications history, as well as the history of American music. But besides the fact that it is doubtful that the mere novelty of the phonograph was powerful enough to unilaterally determine lasting shifts in people’s daily behavior, (or that no music motivated 20th century social movements outside of the 1960s counterculture), I think we really need to interrogate the notion that recording technology was primarily a source of private and introverted musicality and that the public concert was primarily a source of shared experience and sociality.

The 19th-century music lovers I’ve studied, for example, frequently reported feeling alone in their passion for music. While they listened at concerts in the midst of friends and family, they insisted that their listening was individual; their friends did not hear the same sounds and were not moved in the same way. The longing music lovers felt, as they awaited the next visit of an orchestra, was a little embarrassing; rather than risk condemnation or ridicule, they recorded their concert experiences privately in their diaries.

Even if we accept that music listening in the 19th century was more fundamentally social compared to iPod use in the  21st century, the question remains: social how? There were different kinds of social relationships between audiences and performers, between audiences and works, and among audience members at urban concerts from their emergence in the 1830s through the early 20th century. Elites coyly displaying the latest fashion at a recital, young clerks sitting in an astonished hush while witnessing a virtuoso, and bourgeois reformers enacting the ideal of an educated citizenry through reverent listening were all participating socially in music events but with different motivations and beliefs about what that participation entailed and what it meant.

Our analyses of iPod listening ought to at least hold open the possibility that what’s going on is as equally layered as concert listening in the 19th century. Saval rightly asks, "We need a way to find out what all this music listening is doing to us, or what we're doing with it." But his discussion doesn't quite get at the latter as much as it might. The essay ends with his own dismay at “ubiquitous music” and a call to reject "the obscure social injunction that condemns us to a lifetime of listening." This strikes me as little different than John Philip Sousa's call for Americans to reject the phonograph back in 1906. Sousa couldn't see the point of canned music, relative to amateur performance, but his readers did; the phonograph did not, as he predicted, end the piano lesson or the marching band or, for that matter, Americans' interest in music. In the case of the iPod, the same might be true. People may be listening to more music than ever, and frequently doing so through earbuds, but they are likely making sense of that behavior, relative to other forms of musical participation, in ways that scholars are only beginning to explain.

The Erotic Economy of Fandom

Cultural studies scholars have long recognized the defiant nature of fandom; in early fan studies, fans are always somehow negotiating hegemony, or poaching texts, or resisting the mainstream. While writing Tramps Like Us, I reacted warily to these characterizations. While creative re-use of texts and resistance to producers' intentions were certainly elements of music fan culture, defining fans' experiences in that way did not quite fully characterize the appeal of fandom for fans themselves, who talked mostly about strong feelings of connection, knowing, and transformation.

There is a complex relationship between fan practices and the context of late capitalism in which those practices have been made most meaningful. I still believe, as I stated in Tramps Like Us, that fandom is inextricably linked to the commodification of culture since the late 1700s. And in my new work, Listening and Longing, I spend much time describing public, commercial, musical entertainment and its appeal to early consumer/listeners. But I remain convinced that we need to remain open to ways of thinking about what fandom is, and why it matters, beyond mere oppositional politics (however sympathetic one might be with the goal of that approach). I think it's the only way to accurately work out the entirety of fandom's history and significance.

Fans love stars, works, styles, culture. How do we think about that love more fully? I have, in the past, written about the passion of fans in terms of religious discourse. Another way to think about it, perhaps, is the "commerce of the creative spirit" as explained in Lewis Hyde's The Gift. First published in 1983, it was released in a 25th anniversary edition in 2007. It's essentially a series of essays that probe the idea of gifting in non- or pre-capitalist cultures, using the knowledge built from that exercise to better understand the value of creativity in Western industrial-capitalism.

Hyde's book begins by setting up a dichotomy of an “economy of eros” against an “economy of logos” (vaguely reminiscent of Ferdinand Tonnies's Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft), where “cash exchange is to gift exchange what reason is to enthusiasm.” Hyde then places artistic expression into this framework, arguing that artistic expression functions in the realm of eros and enthusiasm, having value not in the monetary power of contracted ownership but rather in the social bonds created by its ritual release and circulation. As he says,

The art that matters to us--which moves the heart, or revives the soul, or delights the senses, or offers courage for living, however we choose to describe the experience--that work is received by us as a gift is received. Even if we have paid a fee at the door of the museum or concert hall, when we are touched by a work of art something comes to us which has nothing to do with price...

Later, he explains:

It is the cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people, while the sale of a commodity leaves no necessary connection.

Hyde means to give courage to those who live and work at the margins of the market economy and outside of the framework of achievement (making money) that has characterized much of American capitalism. What I really like about the book in terms of fan studies is the way in which his articulation of the gift—as the establishment of a bond that powerfully endures by being passed on—touches on many of the ways that fans describe their love of cultural commodities. And, in the end, Hyde is open to thinking about gifting as multilateral. When he's thinking only about artists, he reductively opposes them (in ideology and condition) to capitalists; when he's thinking about consumers, he better recognizes how messy things can be and how, sometimes, despite one’s surroundings or the origins of the roles they inhabit, one’s emotions can imbue unexpected meaning to any action. As he says, “The conflict between freedom and the bonds that gifts establish is not absolute, of course. To begin with, gifts do not bring us attachment unless they move us.” Or: “Within certain limits, gift wealth may be rationalized and market wealth may be eroticized.” In other words, people in a capitalist culture--especially in a capitalist culture—must work out, in each moment, the extent to which their actions will be erotic or rational. It seems to me that, at the experiential level, this is a useful way to think about the history of audience enthusiasm.