Listening In Summary
Citation:
Voida, Amy, Grinter, Rebecca E., Ducheneaut, Nicolas, Edwards, W. Keith, and Newman, Mark W. (2005). Listening in: Practices surrounding iTunes music sharing. Proceedings from CHI, April 2–7, Portland, Oregon, USA.
Summary:
This article by Voida et al is an interesting and surprisingly absorbing examination of the social, technological and rhetorical implications of sharing music using the iTunes application.
At the beginning of the article, Voida et al frame their discussion by stating that the majority of discussions on music sharing have focused on the legal and ethical effects, while ignoring the day-to-day, social effects of music sharing.
After pointing out the defining feature of iTunes, the ability to share your music with others on your same subnetwork, Voida points out the differences between this and two previous forms of music sharing—mix tapes and peer-to-peer file sharing. The fact that the sharing is user-focused and restricted to a subset of the population places iTunes directly between the two previous examples.
The rest of the article focuses on the design of the application and how this design is used or not used by the members of these subnets. Voida et al found that the discussions of what and how to share music were tied very directly to how users would be perceived by the rest of the group. Coworkers could choose to use (or not use) iTunes to learn more about each other, educate each other and interact socially. It’s interesting that iTunes was used for undersigned purposes like seeing who was in the office or of someone computer had crashed.
The article gave a very personal face to music sharing and how if effected interpersonal communication. If this had been written just a year later, I wonder how the sharing of podcasts, which reflect a wider range of personal information, would effect iTunes sharing activity.
-M. Markham
