On 28/05/07, Nancy Baym <nbaym@ku.edu> wrote:
For now though, I'm on a quest to scrobble lots of Queens of the Stone Age.
Which leads to the point that many people seem to game the system, either playing lots of things they want to be seen as listening to whether they're listening or not, or making sure scrobbling is off when they listen to things that don't fit the image they want to project.
Nancy
Thanks for the reference. I did once check into the "top players" of particular groups and they seem to be playing those tracks an infeasible number of times. As you say, there's definitely an element of gaming the system going on. Relatedly, I wonder if we'll get a story of "so and so" sacked/disciplined for playing unsuitable music during working hours with their scrobbler record being used as evidence. I think your comment about groups being used as identity badges in social network sites might well be interesting from a folkloristic perspective. I'm used to thinking of groups being crucibles of culture but the relationship between identity, individual and the group seems quite complex in social network sites. For example the playful groups on Facebook ("When this group gets a 1000 members, Tony Blair will dance the Macarena") seem to thrive if they look good on an individual profile. Such groups might, actually, be thought of as artistic expression, as a sort of collaborative joke. The key to this appears to be embedding and badges. Using badges to show membership in groups as an aspect of identity is nothing new but it seems as though embedding has created a new method of doing this via social software and web services. Bruce