Narratives

âOMG,â Elizabeth thumbs into her cell phoneâs miniature keyboard. âHeâs soooo cute.â Send.

Perched in a windowsill high above the city, Elizabeth coos over her new nephew. âWhat a peanut!â

Elizabethâs sister smiles from the hospital bed. Andyâs not even a day old, still wrapped tightly in the wardâs white-and-blue swaddling blanket, his tiny facing peeking out from his motherâs arms.

Elizabeth points the cell at Andy and peers through the viewfinder. The baby screws up his already crinkled face. She clicks a photo with the built-in camera, which makes the sound of an old-fashioned camera shutter, for no good reason. Send.

âMust already be the most photographed baby of all time,â her sister laughs. âYou should have seen mom. Youâd think sheâs never seen a baby before. Her poor friends. Theyâve probably all exceeded the quota on their AOL inboxes from all her endless e-mails. Sheâs never learned how to avoid sending pictures as enormo attachments.â

Elizabeth takes Andyâs tiny hand. She runs her finger over the plastic bracelet he wears. âCohen, Baby Boy,â it reads, along with a bunch of other data that a nurse entered into a computer kiosk somewhere. Time of birth, momâs name, a unique identifier, and so forth.

âHey, what about my friends? Iâve been texting them every three minutes since he was born.â

âAt least theyâre used to it. Thereâs no doubt they know to ignore half your messages. Just so they can get something done all day.â

âNot when thereâs a picture of your adorable Andy attached,â Elizabeth pouts, fiddling with the cell phone. âActually, I put the pictures all up on Flickr. My friends who really want to know what Iâm up to subscribe to my Flickr feed, so they get a ping every time I upload a new picture. So I guess their RSS readers look kinda like the inboxes of momâs friends. But thatâs their problem.â

âAndyâs dad is keeping a copy of every e-mail a friend sends in to say congrats in a special folder on our computer at home,â her sister says. âHe figures thatâll be a twenty-first century baby book. We havenât gotten a single hand-written note of welcome to little Andy.â

Without warning, Elizabeth flips out her phone again and trains the lens on her weary new mother of a sister. Click. âHah! Gotcha. Momâll love it.â Send.

Fast-forward: Andyâs four-and-three-quarters. Heâs been typing e-mails to his grandparents and, most important, his Aunt Elizabeth since he was two. Well, heâs had a little help from mom, who lifts him onto her lap, queues up the e-mail program, types in the destination e-mail address, and lets Andy clack away on whatever keys he can reach.

The early mails from precocious Andy to Aunt Elizabeth read: âwwnijrosffreeooxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxâ and âijgjigrrwopo[-[pppppppppppp.â She loves them. Theyâre saved to the harddrive of her Apple in a special folder called âAndy.â Heâs her favorite digital correspondent, bar none.

Andyâs momâs laptop is a bigger draw than the TV in the basement. Not a close call, actually. Andyâs a big fan of time on his own, so long as that means heâs plunked in front of the screen of a laptop playing interactive games. His mom worries a little about too much âscreen time.â But Andy loves it, and he goes only on good, safe sites, with a parent always nearby.

Andyâs latest favorite site is pbskids.org. He doesnât know it, but âBetween the Lionsâ is teaching him the alphabet and leading him on some early steps toward reading. (Heâs also getting exposed to the âChick-Fil-Aâ icon every time he logs on. Theyâre the corporate sponsor for the web site.)

In order to play âBetween the Lions,â thereâs a catch. You have to download a bit of software made by a company called Adobe. In the processing of downloading the software, you are prompted to give Adobe word of whether you are over 18 or not, your name, and your e-mail address. Another entry in the Digital Nativeâs distributed digital file is born.

The Digital File - Issues of Documentation & Management

Problems

Solutions

Creating, Exploring & Asserting Identity Using Digital Media

Asserting Identity with the Mp3 Player

(Including excerpts from Miriam Simunâs unpublished dissertation)

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 outletâ¦it also means that âdigital information explosionâ (the ever-faster growing amount of published information available) and 'Digital Information Overload' (defined on wikipedia as âthe state of having too much information to make a decision or remained informed about a topic,â] is always in your face. The information explosion surrounds, shoving the native simultaneously in different directions, making it hard to stand ground as âyourselfâ â especially when at times itâs impossible to even hear yourself think.

Shuhei Hosokowa argues that mobile auditory devices serve as âurban strategy,â 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 â and the emotion or memory that invokes â 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 â and (by not submitting to foreign messages) to others â 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 âmodernityâ 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 âselfâ 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 existenceâ¦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 âperpectival and circumstantial incongruity,â 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 âre-enforceâ 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.

Nativesâ 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 â 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 âher ownâ amongst a chaotic city commute, natives carry this theme of personalization into their wider lives â by creating and âshowing their ownâ in order to â among many other reasons â assert themselves amongst a sea of information and influence.

Web 2.0 was not born out of thin air â personalization has been the coming trend of this millennium. For those that object that the Mp3 player is nothing but a âsuped-upâ walkman â crucially, as users describe, the chief power of the Mp3 is not that it doesnât skip, or even that it fits in your pocket â what makes this gadget a revolutionary one â and why in many places youâre hard pressed to find someone walking down the street without one â 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 âmouldâ spaces on the internet to culturally specific shapes and purposes (The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach, 2000). Similarly, Mp3 users very much âmouldâ their commute into âpersonally specific shapes and purposes.â Users use music to configure the personal spaces they create for particular and private purposes. DeNora writes of the way âmusic 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,â (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: âHere I am. I am what I decide. I am me.â

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 âmoulded spacesâ that he calls upon at will. He explains that âYou need to have music to fit all of your moods.â In invoking music to control his mood, he facilitates whatever activity he chooses. As such, Chaoâs 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 Iâm going out, I put something on with a bit of base, and it can motivate me. I think it makes you feel more confidentâ¦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 âget outâ 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, itâs hot, itâs crowdedâ¦Letâs say Iâm listening to my Japanese music, that means Iâm thinking about my trip to Japan for an hour, which is almost a privilege when youâve 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 âhead spaceâ 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 (âI wonât think too much about the homeless man I pass if Iâm bopping to AK1200â). 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 itâs so big, itâs so stressful, and itâs so different and diverse, and thereâs stuff going on all the time. I feel happier, more confident, and Iâm more in controlâ¦Londonâs got a fast pace of life, which I like, but itâs difficult to deal with, so thereâs more stimuli than there are in other places, there are more different kinds of peopleâ¦you donât see so many familiar facesâ¦.you can zone outâ¦you can decide, right, ok Iâve had enough, Iâm 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 onâ¦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 â the crowded and chaotic urban commute. As Boris describes:

I just really, really love the music that I like, I donât have all these different types of music, itâs mostly just techno, the really hard stuffâ¦so it just always re-enforces my, [pause] re-enforces me.â

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 thereâ¦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 backgroundâ¦when youâve got your music on youâre 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 âhisâ 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 musicâs 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 â resulting in, as Hosokawa describes, an autonomous and mobile self.

By entering into these âpersonal sound worlds,â users are already challenging the status quo â 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 â 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 â of messages in any form â 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.

Issues

Does the Mp3 player facilitate escapist behaviour?

Consider the comment of Keisha, a twenty-year-old college student:

I use [my Mp3 player] everyday. I have the remote for it, so I lie in bed, and press play, and it comes on in the morning. And then when I walk to school, I use it to walk to school, and then, walking home, and I also have it on as background when Iâm cleaning or somethingâ¦ I fall asleep listening to it through my speakersâ¦I donât like silenceâ¦I like to have something going on constantly, I think I might just sit there and think, and if I think too much, ahh, I donât like it, I just like to get on with things.

Q: So it keeps you from thinking?

A: Not keeps me from thinking, but keeps me from thinking about things that I donât want to think aboutâ¦It distracts me.

Keishaâs listening routine points to just how constantly connected many Digital Natives are throughout their daily lives. Her invoking of a continual soundtrack to avoid unpleasant thoughts point to the possibilities of this digital media to serve as an escape. By filling in all time and sound with music, natives may ignore problems they face by squeezing out any challenging or unpleasant thoughts. However, the media decry after the explosion of the iPod market of âtuned-outâ kids, no longer paying attention to the world they live in, is an exaggeration of both the way Mp3 players are being used, and the power of the object to be responsible for young peopleâs inattention. Such panics are also reminiscent of past generation-gap related concerns. The above exploratory study showed that in fact, users are very aware of the different ways and levels to which they immerse themselves in the music playing in their Mp3 players. Users purposely navigate their level of attention to surroundings, and their level of âpresenceâ in different environments.

Nevertheless, it remains important to note the abilities that the Mp3 player, as well as other digital media, gives to its users to escape their f2f (face2face) lives and concerns. This is not to say that it is the digital media that is encouraging this escapist behaviour, but that the emergence of a generation with a capability to be so constantly connected provides a new, and perhaps better facilitating medium through which escapist behaviour can be pursued.

Who owns and controls the interactive platforms that Digital Natives are personalizing, modifying, and creating identities in? Also see The business with digital creativity Digital Creativity#Structure