[NetCult] Jonathan Sterne — MP3 as Cultural Artifact

Chatting today about this great Jonathan Sterne article on the MP3 format as a container technology with a rich cultural presence, capable of study as an artifact in its own right. Super smart mode of media history—download it here [PDF].

I wrote this summary a few months ago:

The MP3 as Cultural Artifact
Jonathan Sterne. New Media & Society 8:5 (2006).

Because the mp3 encoding format has become an universal language for online audio, sparking an international intellectual property controversy, Sterne urges the reader to consider the cultural, social, and historical development of this technological artifact as a way to navigate the dramatic impact mp3s are making from daily listening praxeology to the politics of the recording industry. Opening with a citation from Langdon Winner reminding us that “technological artifacts ‘embody specific forms of power and authority’,” Sterne writes from the social construction (Wiebe Bijker) and actor-network theory (Bruno Latour) perspective on the construction of technologies, focussing specifically on Zoë Sofia’s expansion of Lewis Mumford’s concept of “container technologies” as applied to the mp3. From the technical details of mp3 sampling (and its historical development) to the technology’s dependence on ‘distracted’ human listeners and the limited capacity bandwidth of computer networks, Sterne makes a convincing case for the cultural bias of the mp3 (its ‘highest moral calling’) that demands audio redundancies, easy distribution, hard drive storage, and distracted listening subjects. Initially developed by the recording industry in response to digital recording challenges, the mp3 has come to express the character of its technology in social terms: an important consideration for those engaged in intellectual property discussions as well as the everyday user-listener.

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From the article:

“The mp3 is a form designed for massive exchange, casual listening and massive accumulation. As a container technology designed to execute a process on its contents, it does what it was made to do. The primary, illegal uses of the mp3 are not aberrant uses or an error in the technology; they are its highest moral calling: ‘Eliminate redundancies! Reduce bandwidth use! Travel great distances frequently and with little effort! Accumulate on the hard drives of the middle class! Address a distracted listening subject!’ These are the instructions encoded into the very form of the mp3. This is the mission that an mp3 carries out as it travels down network lines onto my hard drive; as it instructs my computer to construct a datastream that will become electricity, that in turn will vibrate the speakers on my desk and the membranes in my ears as I type this sentence. The mp3 has a job to do, and it does it very well.”

@1 year ago