Disclaimer: I wrote this back in December when it was 'Wrappification season' proper, but never got around to posting it then. Please excuse my tardiness.
Hi blog, long time no see. I’ve been thinking a lot about spectatorship lately, or, more broadly, the way we interact with media. As someone who interacts with media many, many times a day, this heightened interest comes as no shock to me, but has likely been spurred by the Wrappification season. The ‘Wrappification’ season is what I am now going to call the time of year where media platforms and services offer a summary of your yearly interactions, and try to frame it as taste. What may have started as a creative original idea from an (uncredited?) intern has now permeated almost every platform imaginable. But as more and more of my metrics are regurgitated back to me, I become less and less impressed with what they actually tell me. Are my preferences and tastes solely reflected by how many times I listened to a certain song or artist? Certainly not!
As platforms and their associated algorithms exert an ever-increasing amount of control over what we consume and when, it becomes all the more important to realize that taste is not dictated by data alone. My main argument here is that an increased prevalence of the ‘Wrappification Season’ leads to less meaningful conceptions of taste, less meaningful interactions with media, and a degradation of the individual from a dignified spectator, solely to an observer (or consumer).
Before I get ahead of myself, let me introduce a pretty important guy.
This is French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. You can’t talk about taste without mentioning him! In his seminal work, ‘Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste’, he seeks to “determine how the cultivated disposition and cultural competence that are revealed in the nature of the cultural goods consumed, and the way they are consumed, vary according to the category of agents and the area which they are applied.” (1984, 13) His findings made an important relationship clear: the link between cultural practices (what people do and how they do it) and educational capital and social origin. Essentially, he thought that the selections we make as consumers cannot simply be reduced to matters of personal discernments, they are expressions of upbringing, occupation, and social class. Tastes are social, and are acquired through conditioning relative to social origin and trajectory, but are experienced as something natural and personal.
Bourdieu’s thoughts on music were pretty clear, he wrote that, “nothing more clearly affirms one’s ‘class’, nothing more infallibly classifies, than tastes in music” (1984, 18). At the time of writing, Bourdieu thought of music as more of a ‘pure’ knowledge, as compared to viewing art in a museum, or going to a restaurant to eat cuisine, because music is marked by less of an outward display. But, times have changed. I can’t determine if Bourdieu would have anticipated the rise of Spotify Wrapped, and other music-related outward displays of cultural capital (I guess posting a song on your Instagram story would count here– I do this often), or the rise of cultural omnivorousness, but it is clear that his argument must be reevaluated in light of these new developments.
Let me reverse back to cultural omnivorousness. It’s a little hard to imagine, but only a short time ago (in the grand scheme of things), popular music was not as, well, popular as it is today. The ‘talk of the town’ was usually classical music, as high class, wealthy individuals attended exclusive (and expensive) performances, and engaged in criticism. But, yet again, the times changed! This time, specifically, access to music changed, in the form of CDs, file sharing sites, and, you guessed it, streaming services! I’m going to start referencing some really cool research papers here, but as the democratization of music gives consumers more opportunities to listen to different songs, artists and genres, it begs the question– does their cultural taste expand too (Nelson, 2022)? To me, the answer is obviously yes. Luckily, my own personal observations are supported by some pretty big names in the field of sociology. As influential as Bourdieu was, and continues to be, sociologist Richard Peterson introduced somewhat of a competing idea in 1992. Peterson identified the ‘blurring’ of traditional lines between ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ culture- and pointed to the emergence of a kind of ‘cultural omnivore’, who were usually young, highly educated, affluent professionals.
“As a long-term professor of sociology at Vanderbilt University with a strong interest in both arts and music, Peterson was in an ideal position to develop the concept of cultural omnivorousness. He believed that earlier cultural divisions no longer described American tastes in music and the arts. He suggested that cultural omnivorousness was a product of major political, social, and economic changes that had taken place in the United States between World War II and the 1990s. Thus, the cultural omnivore was said to make fewer distinctions between cultural genres than at any point in American history. For example, a cultural omnivore might enjoy both classical (highbrow) and country (lowbrow) music and might enjoy foods ranging from gourmet offerings to street-corner hot dogs.
Research on cultural omnivorousness suggests that it is a direct result of the democratization of the arts, which has made elements of highbrow culture more accessible to the rest of the population and redrawn lines separating different genres, and of social mobility. Socially mobile individuals have been influenced by more than one culture at different points in their lives. Thus, cultural omnivores do not recognize rigid racial, ethnic, or gender barriers. Contrarily, the univore is inclined to express preferences or engage in activities that are associated with his/her own social class. Numerous studies on cultural tastes and activities have been conducted in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Israel, Spain, and Sweden.”
Thanks for bearing with me blog. Let me introduce a few more really awesome research papers. In his paper titled, “Bourdieu and the Sociology of Music Consumption: A Critical Assessment of Recent Development” Nick Prior asks to what extent Bourdieu’s claims about social stratification and music consumption are still relevant and whether they are sophisticated enough to deal with the specific ways we interact with musical forms. In light of developments in technology and overall taste (the rise of the cultural omnivore), the article argues that Bourdieu’s claims are not all that relevant. So what are music sociologists to do? A few new perspectives are also alluded to in the article,
“For Tia DeNora, sociologists have been too quick to discard the musical properties of music. They’ve ignored the multifarious ways that music ‘‘gets into action’’ (DeNora2000, 8), including how it activates our memories and emotional states. To take music seriously means to avoid reducing it to an indicator of some hidden structural social force or distinction strategy. Music is more dynamic than this, for DeNora. It modulates emotions, evokes senses and equips identities. In the flow of everyday life, music affords an‘‘inner sonorous life’’ (DeNora 2004, 217), acting with and upon our phenomenological worlds, colouring our loves, desires and feelings. Drawing on insights from interactionism and ethnomethodology, DeNora argues that if we ground our sociological analysis in the local situations in which music is used, we are able to properly recognize music’s powers (DeNora 2000). This means shifting the level of examination from a general sociology of music to a specific sociology of people doing things with music; from the idea of con-straining social structures to the constitutive effects of musical meanings.”
(emphasis added)
The article also references Antoine Hennon, who (in my opinion) respects the dignity and critical facilities of the music listener, as he views them as never passive, and engaged and inventive in the ways in which they let music enter their lives. His alternative to Bourdieu draws on Actor Network Theory’s recognition of the agency of objects, and the ongoing adjustments that occur as music exchanges its properties with us. Within Actor Network Theory (which is an approach to social theory that sets everything in the social and natural world in a constantly shifting network of relationships), music taste is not a property, but an activity- a dynamic set of engagements which unfolds moment to moment. Like DeNora, Hennion asks us to shift from a sociology of distinction to a ‘phenomenology of dedication’, where music is a ceremony of pleasure, a series of little habits and ways of doing things in real life.
I think this is a nice way to evaluate our own relationship with music. Interactions with music are certainly not created equally. Here are some examples:
Attending a concert and hearing the group play your favorite song
Flipping through different radio stations (does anyone actually still do this?) until you find a song you like on your commute home from work
Mindlessly listening to the background music playing in the grocery store
Searching the depths of the Internet for a one-off version of a song or cover you like (heres one of my favorite examples of that)
Pressing shuffle on a playlist created for you by your streaming platform of choice
I’m sure the list could go on. But, underlying all of these ‘ways of listening’, are the distinct choices regarding what you are actually listening to. Sometimes, it is your choice, but other times, it might be the DJ’s choice, the corporate executive’s choice, the band manager’s choice, or even, the algorithm’s choice. Our friend Bourdieu had a name for this group of decision makers: cultural intermediaries. In his book, Distinction, Bourdieu presents cultural intermediaries as a group of taste makers, whose work is part of an economy that requires the production of consuming tastes and dispositions. I’m leaving quite a bit out, but if you’re craving more information on Bourdieu’s thoughts on cultural intermediaries check this primer out.
Recognizing these intermediaries, and more importantly, recognizing the different ways we interact with music becomes all the more important in a world full of cultural omnivores, no longer bound by traditional barriers to access, or notions of class. So, taste in music is perhaps no longer a matter of what specifically we consume, but how we consume it– i.e. who, or what is making those consumption choices for us. And increasingly, it is the streaming platforms and algorithms themselves!
An article by Jack Webster states that, “Through the provision of personalised playlists and recommendations, music streaming platforms are seeking to alleviate the labour involved in finding relevant music, attempting to perform as a ‘taste-maker’ for each individual user. In contrast for those who have a more casual relationship with music, the judgements made by music streaming platforms about what is ‘right’ for them might not be so contentious.”
I’m going to say this is Part 1 because this is my blog and its just for fun. Part 2 soon. Or not.
