Mp3

I didn't get quite enough of a chance to discuss the issues brought up in my reading this week because of the rushed nature of our podcast. I'd like to redress that because I think that Sterne's article "The Mp3 as a Cultural Artifact" radically changed the way that I perceive Mp3s. As Sterne points out, much of the literature devoted to the Mp3 has focused on the Mp3 as a container technology. This is largely due to the furor surrounding illegal downloads, in this respect the Mp3 is a technological container whose properties make it ideal for illegal file sharing. But as Sterne points out, this ignores the cultural significance of the Mp3 itself beyond its function. I had never considered this proposition, to be perfectly honest I'm an Mp3 kleptomaniac and had never even considered it in any other context than my listening pleasure and the ongoing moral panic about illegal file sharing. But Sterne's article made me pause to consider the cultural impact of the Mp3 and the Mp3 as a cultural artifact. Sterne certainly puts forward a convincing case. As he rightly points out, the Mp3 has radically changed the way we consume music. It preemptively decides for us what we don't need in order to have a satisfactory listening experience in a distracting environment. It cuts out any data it considers to be superfluous to this end and delivers a product designed not to give us a full experience but a convenient one. It also compresses musical data to be conveniently sent across distances in small amounts of time, and to operate in a limited bandwidth environment. Put together, all these elements show that rather than being simply a container technology, the Mp3 is a sophisticated little piece of software that has fundamentally changed the way we hear music in order that our listening experience keep up with our own cultural shifts such as the development of Web 2.0 and ever increasing multitasking/time poverty. If anyone hasn't yet read the article I strongly suggest you do so. After reading Sterne's article I went and listened to an old fashioned cd and was truly stunned, I'd had to listen to this particular album more than a dozen times in Mp3 format and thought I knew it back to front, but hearing it played off a cd AND in an undistracted environment I couldn't believe just how different it sounded. It certainly proved to me that the Mp3 had drastically changed how I hear music, coupled with the transferability of the Mp3 across distance and systems I have to agree with Sterne; the Mp3 does seem to be a cultural artifact in its own right.

See: Jonathan Sterne (2006). The Mp3 as cultural artefact. New Media & Society, Vol. 8(5), pp825-42.