Asserting Identity with the Mobile Media

The Digital Native is constantly connected. To be constantly connected is to have continual access to your friends, to your chosen information, to your creative outlet…it also means that ‘digital information explosion’ (the ever-faster growing amount of published information available) and 'Digital Information Overload' (defined on wikipedia as ‘the state of having too much information to make a decision or remained informed about a topic,’] is always in your face. The information explosion surrounds, shoving the native simultaneously in different directions, making it hard to stand ground as ‘yourself’ – especially when at times it’s impossible to even hear yourself think.

Looking at Mp3 Players

(Including excerpts from "My Music, My World: Using the Mp3 player to shape experience in London" (Simun 2009))

Shuhei Hosokowa argues that mobile auditory devices serve as ‘urban strategy,’ for users to gain control over their chaotic and disjointed urban environment. By tuning into the Mp3 player, users invoke their own personalized soundtrack for navigating and managing their environments. They not only choose what to become deaf to (advertisements on the radio, the old man on the corner asking for a nickel, or teachers walking down the hall), but super-impose their own music – and the emotion or memory that invokes – onto their experiences. As an 'urban strategy,' the Mp3 enables users to re-configure and re-interpret the world around them. By plugging into the Mp3 player, users take control of their own attention, and assert to themselves – and (by not submitting to foreign messages) to others – who they are.

By choosing music to listen to, users re-configure the self. Tia DeNora, a sociologist of music, explains of aesthetic reflexivity, a strategy individuals employ to understand, perform, and reconcile the self amidst the fragmented modern world:

"Following Simmel, recent social theory concerned with ‘modernity’ has conceived of the rise of aestheticisation as a strategy for preserving identity and social boundaries under the anonymous and often crowded conditions of existence. The modern ‘self’ is portrayed, within this perspective, as subject to heightened demands for flexibility and variation. Actors move, often at rapid pace, through the numerous and often crowded conditions that characterise daily existence…The self is called upon to be increasingly agile, to be able to manage perspectival and circumstantial incongruity, as happens, for example, when individuals move rapidly through numerous and often discrete worlds where personnel and values may clash," (DeNora 2000: 51-2).

This argument, that the chaotic and overwhelming features of the city requires agility in managing the ‘perpectival and circumstantial incongruity,’ may very well be extended to the digital environment natives find themselves in. Even in the remotest country-side home, a laptop can bring the native, albeit in a different way, directly into this clash of worlds, of ideas, and of values. In the city, the Mp3 serves as a management tool. It enables users to turn the incongruity of the chaotic commute into a single harmonious experience, but it also helps users manage and ‘re-enforce’ themselves among chaotic conditions. For the non-urban digital native, their Mp3 players may not serve the same functions, but the adamant personalization of media, and of experience, may very well be a response to assert the self amidst an overwhelming digital media landscape.

Natives’ tendency towards creativity on the internet (see Digital Creativity) can be viewed as an assertion of identity. Amidst a digital landscape that offers up a constant explosion of information – and influence - natives not only assert their own music choices, but also their personal thoughts and experiences, as well as their own political beliefs. Perhaps in a similar way to the urban dweller turning on her music to stand ‘her own’ amongst a chaotic city commute, natives carry this theme of personalization into their wider lives – by creating and ‘showing their own’ in order to – among many other reasons – assert themselves amongst a sea of information and influence.

Web 2.0 was not born out of thin air – personalization has been the coming trend of this millennium. For those that object that the Mp3 player is nothing but a ‘suped-up’ walkman – crucially, as users describe, the chief power of the Mp3 is not that it doesn’t skip, or even that it fits in your pocket – what makes this gadget a revolutionary one – and why in many places you’re hard pressed to find someone walking down the street without one – is that users can play anything they want, any time they want, and in any order they decide. No longer constrained to the 16 track CD set out by artists, A&D gurus, and recording companies, users choose their own line-ups of songs, podcasts, and even personal creations.

Don Slater and Daniel Miller write about how Trinidadians ‘mould’ spaces on the internet to culturally specific shapes and purposes (The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach, 2000). Similarly, Mp3 users very much ‘mould’ their commute into ‘personally specific shapes and purposes.’ Users use music to configure the personal spaces they create for particular and private purposes. DeNora writes of the way ‘music is an active ingredient in the organization of self, the shifting of mood, energy level, conduct style, mode of attention and engagement with the world,’ (2000: 61). By engaging in Mp3 listening, individuals sustain a consistent emotion amidst the rapidly changing stimuli of the city. This enables them to organize their behavior and re-configure the self while on the move.

Users carefully and purposely create and choose specific soundtracks to facilitate a particular mood, to prepare for a certain event, or simply to have their very own super-hero soundtrack banging away in their ears as they navigate through their world. Natives take control of what they hear, and in doing so, they tell not only themselves, but also all the excluded influences: ‘Here I am. I am what I decide. I am me.’

Consider how some natives (and few immigrants) describe the power they invoke by turning on their Mp3 players:

Chao, one of the study participants, has a number of ‘moulded spaces’ that he calls upon at will. He explains that ‘You need to have music to fit all of your moods.’ In invoking music to control his mood, he facilitates whatever activity he chooses. As such, Chao’s Mp3 functions as a prescriber of action:

It focuses my thoughts more, and I have more control over them, and I can use it cathartically, so if I want to think about a relationship, I can choose music that will remind me of that and it will bring out emotion, or if I want to think about something I can focus on it. Also, if I’m going out, I put something on with a bit of base, and it can motivate me. I think it makes you feel more confident…you can psyche yourself up for things, so if I was going to a job interview, I would choose music that would get me in the right mindset.

The Mp3 provides Chao a wide selection of music from which to configure his person. He is able to organise himself to ‘get out’ emotions, concentrate for a job interview or motivate himself for a night out, all in the midst of his commute. The Mp3 allows Chao, in any place and time, to summon the version of his self he chooses.

Gemma uses music to re-configure her journey as a time for reflection. She plays music to recall specific memories while commuting:

You deal with getting on the bus, which is impossible, then the tube, then I have to change lines, it’s hot, it’s crowded…Let’s say I’m listening to my Japanese music, that means I’m thinking about my trip to Japan for an hour, which is almost a privilege when you’ve got all these things thrust at you.

Gemma is re-configuring the disjointed environment of her commute into a single fluid space filled with memories of Japan. Furthermore, Gemma is creating the ‘head space’ Hosokawa writes of. By disassociating from her environment and the demands it makes upon her, she exerts autonomy and mobilises the self by indulging in a personal aspect of her life while navigating London.

Criticisms of this type of music listening contend that it is simply a form of distraction and pacification. Some claim that listeners are simply super-imposing irrelevant soundtracks onto their surroundings to distract them from critically engaging with important issues they face (“I won’t think too much about the homeless man I pass if I’m bopping to AK1200”). While some uses of music may be deemed illusory, individuals are actors in appropriating various personal meanings, and subsequent uses, of music. In fact, individuals actively use these meanings to re-configure their understandings, actions and place in the world (DeNora 2000).

As Chao describes, the Mp3 player enables him with not only the power to personalize and thereby better cope with any environment he finds himself in, but he also re-asserts himself amidst a demanding environment, thereby generally improving his experiences:

[With my Mp3 payer,] I feel happier. It helps me deal with things; I choose what I want to interact with. It works very well in London. London I have difficulties living in, because it’s so big, it’s so stressful, and it’s so different and diverse, and there’s stuff going on all the time. I feel happier, more confident, and I’m more in control…London’s got a fast pace of life, which I like, but it’s difficult to deal with, so there’s more stimuli than there are in other places, there are more different kinds of people…you don’t see so many familiar faces….you can zone out…you can decide, right, ok I’ve had enough, I’m zoning out, and also the speed of it, I want to slow it down. I want to be on the tube, and just slow down, so I put Morcheeba on…I just take control a bit.

For many users, the Mp3 serves as a tool of personal re-enforcement. DeNora writes of the way users identify with a certain music, and then by listening to this music they both express and perform the self. The Mp3 allows people to re-enforce the self in the very environment where it is most dominated – the crowded and chaotic urban commute. As Boris describes:

I just really, really love the music that I like, I don’t have all these different types of music, it’s mostly just techno, the really hard stuff…so it just always re-enforces my, [pause] re-enforces me.’

Later in the interview, he mentions the importance of this ability in London:

[I am] switching on to the music, obviously, but switching on to life, being a bit more there…I think the reason why you need the cocoon, and this is why I listen to it in London more than I listen to it anywhere else, is because in London its very easy to lose yourself, to just bleed into the background…when you’ve got your music on you’re more you, and more able to keep yourself a bit separate from the madness around you.

Here Boris describes how he purposely moulds a personal space within a chaotic environment which can at times dominate him. Within this space ‘his’ music serves as a re-enforcement, an enabler to carry the self, now mobile, through the city.

The above users describe how entering into a private sound world amidst their London commutes enables them to mould personal spaces in which they use music to organize and re-enforce the self. They call upon music’s many forces to prescribe action and configure various types of leisure within these spaces. In this way users separate from their surroundings while performing the self amidst them – resulting in, as Hosokawa describes, an autonomous and mobile self.

By entering into these ‘personal sound worlds,’ users are already challenging the status quo – by introducing the private sphere (categorized by personal will, comfort, and desire) into the public sphere (categorized by authority, obligation, and necessity). This phenomenon - of personalizing, and making the private public – is one that truly distinguishes the digital native from the immigrant. Digital Natives have learned in a world where much of both media and experience can be personalized - and this is becoming ever more possible. Their interest in engaging in fixed platforms is weaning in favor of interactive, user-modifiable and user-created platforms. They refuse to be passive consumers – of messages in any form – and assert the right to control their media experiences, to navigate the level and destinations of their attention, and to live in a world, if not created, at least modified according to personal taste.