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Thesis Info
- LABS ID
- 00891
- Thesis Title
- Understanding Musicking on Social Media: Music Sharing, Sociality and Citizenship
- Author
- Raquel Campos Valverde
- E-mail
- raquel.campos.valverde AT gmail.com
- 2nd Author
- 3rd Author
- Degree
- PhD
- Year
- 2019
- Number of Pages
- 299
- University
- London South Bank University
- Thesis Supervisor
- Supervisor e-mail
- Other Supervisor(s)
- Language(s) of Thesis
- Department / Discipline
- Digital Ethnomusicology
- Copyright Ownership
- Languages Familiar to Author
- URL where full thesis can be found
- openresearch.lsbu.ac.uk/item/88x09
- Keywords
- Musicking, Social Media, Digital Ethnography, Citizenship, Music
- Abstract: 200-500 words
- Understanding the online music media practices of users and fans as forms of social musicking, this thesis investigates why people circulate and share music on social media platforms, particularly within the context of recent Spanish migration to the UK. Based on online and offline ethnographic fieldwork among the Spanish community in London and written from the perspective of an insider-outsider, it combines research data from participant observation and interviews to shed light on how the sharing music media is part of wider dynamics of online citizenship and everyday sociality. The thesis responds to these questions by addressing six thematic areas. It explores the uses of music to perform and articulate cultural and gender identity on social media profiles, analysing how online music is both the medium and the arena for discussions of identity politics at a microsocial and interpersonal level. It also investigates how music sharing and compiling can be used to maintain relationships and social capital and to participate in transnational sociality, particularly within migrant families. The thesis also addresses macrosocial dimensions of political participation, and how the circulation of music parody can be a form of citizen engagement in contexts of political conflict such as the Brexit and Catalonian referendums, giving rise to temporary political alliances in the form of online citizen assemblages. The research also considers the circulation of music on social media from the perspective of fandom and how it is influenced by post-object, ephemeral, and algorithmically-reflexive practices. These insights show how the ubiquitous and imagined character of online music media can foster its circulation as a silent and visual element of online sociality, effectively generating practices of imagined listening. The thesis also examines ritualistic practices of music exchange on social media and their relationship with emerging moral economies and values of music circulation as foundational elements of online sociality and citizenship. It concludes by arguing that, in circulating music online through their social media profiles, users develop new forms of (im)material culture-making and reproduction of social life. Online musicking practices enable new ways of being in the world, turning the intangible, time-bound aural and visual experience of online music into something that has a materialised impact in the social lives of users. Through the circulation of music online users search for sociality and form, dissolve, and inhabit temporary music-based alliances that expand their social worlds.