SEM{STUDENTNEWS} An initiative of the Student Concerns Committee of the Society for IN THIS ISSUE Ethnomusicology Welcome! Letter from the Editor 1 SCC Update 2 Digital Ethnomusicology The Limits of Digital Ethnography in a Lo-Fi World 3 The State of the Field 4 Dear SEM 7 Online Bodies: Education + Social Media The Rise of the MOOC 10 Material Student Bodies in a Digitized Academic World 11 Connecting Ethnomusicologists 13 Join your peers by Digital Technologies and Music 14 Volume 6 | Spring/Summer 2013 Volume ‘liking’ us on On Facebook: Part 1 14 Facebook, and get On Facebook: Part 2 15 the latest updates Organizations + Resources 17 and calls for submissions! Our Staff 21 Sites of Convergence a letter from the editor Welcome, dear readers, to the sixth Or at least a semi-luddite, who owns Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand volume of SEM Student News, an iPhone 3G with outdated apps and working on this volume with devoted to the topic “digital and who doesn’t sync anything (the contributors spanning from here to ethnomusicology.” To begin, a few cloud freaks me out). I’m a moderate Hawai‘i to Arkansas to England to questions: What kinds of spaces do Facebooker, and I do depend on the Bali. So when I consider my own you converge in? Where do you Internet for my daily routine—e- sites of convergence, this newsletter loiter? Where are your sites of mails, Young and the Restless is forefront on my mind. As a interaction, contemplation, and updates (don’t judge), hockey scores, publication only available online, procrastination? Is it in a grad guitar tabs, the Māori online whose calls for submissions and lounge, a coffee shop, a friend’s dictionary, and the sea of online announcements happen largely over basement, a kitchen? And while in academic literature that makes up a the SEM listservs and Facebook, it these locales, are you also in another substantial part of ABD life as I gear makes immediately visible the world, a digital world, consuming, up to write my dissertation. And if influence of the digital world in our uploading, downloading, or wading my research were about the Internet? academic work. through the likes of Facebook, I can only imagine how the hours YouTube, JSTOR, or Soundcloud? I spent digitally would multiply. And as I begin to think of life post- have to admit that by modern PhD and prepare to enter the job standards I may be a bit of a luddite. As I write now, I am “in the field” in market, I am flooded with questions Society for Ethnomusicology © 1 Letter from the Editor ... continued about how my digital presence will adopt it in productive, creative, and which their lives as learners, further influence my professional life. meaningful ways—particularly in the teachers, researchers, and writers are LinkedIn, Facebook, Academia.edu education sector—is rapidly affected by the Internet. We hope —how should we be using these sites escalating. We may be among the you enjoy this volume, and we invite as young professionals? Should our first generation of scholars entering you to continue these discussions in teaching plans incorporate digital the job market with these kinds of our own online forum, the “SEM technologies, and to what extent? questions. Student News” Facebook page. While the question of technology in To begin to address these issues, in By Lauren E Sweetman (New York University) Vol 6 | Spring/Summer 2013 Vol academia may not be new anymore, this volume you’ll hear from students our need as young professionals to and scholars about the many ways in SCC Update a letter from your committee By Adam Hall (University of Oklahoma) {STUDENTNEWS} Hello to all from SEM’s Student Concerns Committee (SCC). The committee had a strong presence at the 2012 SEM conference in New Orleans last fall, with a well-attended and highly successful roundtable on publishing. At the student meeting we brought on three new officers to fill vacancies on the committee, and the SCC has had quite a productive year SEM thus far, with many new projects starting to take shape. Part of this includes fostering a greater online presence for the group, with a comprehensive website around the corner that we expect to have up and running this summer. The new site will have a blog that will serve as a forum through which we can share research and fieldwork stories, ask questions, provide advice, and converse with each other about our work and concerns. We also plan to rely on Facebook and listserv announcements to reach more and more students. We are working hard to connect all of us, globally, in order to cultivate community and the sharing of ideas. We are happy to announce some additional changes to the committee itself. As the direct representative of the SEM student body, we are working to make the student voice more prominent within the society. Along that vein, we have some exciting news that will potentially affect all student members of SEM. On the recommendation of the SCC, the SEM board of directors has approved the formation of a new section of the society called the Student Union (SU). All students will be members of the SU, and the executive board of this new section will replace the SCC. This allows for a more inclusive student organization that enables members to participate in projects for the society and to connect with colleagues from across the nation. As part of the formation of the SU, the current committee is making plans for an online nomination process to fill a new position of member-at-large. Please be on the lookout for details on the nomination process and additional information on the SU coming through our various networking sites and the SEM listserv. Finally, Ian Goldstein and Elizabeth Whittenburg Ozment, both highly effective and esteemed SCC co-chairs, retired their positions at the SEM conference. We thank them for their dedication to young and developing ethnomusicologists over the last four years and for being strong advocates for making SEM Student News a reality. We wish them well as they continue to excel in life and in their careers as scholars, professors, and musicians. YOUR SCC: Justin R. Hunter, Chair (top left) University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, [email protected] Jessica Getman, Vice Chair (top right) University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, [email protected] José R. Torres-Ramos, Vice Chair (bottom left) University of North Texas, [email protected] Adam Hall, Secretary (bottom right) University of Oklahoma, [email protected] Society for Ethnomusicology © 2 The Limits of Digital Ethnography in a lo-fi world By Benjamin Tausig (New York University) The prospect of digital ethnomusicology is as tempting as digital technology itself. It gleams with promises of instant connectivity, informational abundance, and images and sounds transmitted with gorgeous clarity. And indeed, much human communication today is interceded by devices that simulate immediacy. Musical fandom blooms on discussion boards, songs stream from the cloud, and work is kickstarted rather than patronized or talent-scouted. Ethnographers are correct to be drawn to this intercession as an important domain for new research. This essay, which is cautiously contrarian, does not dispute the urgency of an ethnomusicological engagement Vol 6 | Spring/Summer 2013 Vol with ontologies of musical telepresence. Rather, it warns against uncareful theorizations of digital interaction as a fully reified place. Technological communication comes laden with metaphors that hinge on the spatial—users “visit” web “sites,” “park” domain names, hang out in chat “rooms,” and so on. Moreover, the early history of Internet discourse is bluntly redolent of colonialism, with its talk of resource-rich virgin territories in need of state and corporate governance. Such metaphors have been justly critiqued. Technology writer Evgeny Morozov points out the policymaking folly of creating equivalencies between the walls and curtains of the Cold War and the political contours of the global {STUDENTNEWS} Internet (2011). To imagine electronic borders in geospatial terms, Morozov suggests, is to map an extremely complex and dynamic network of relationships onto the already creaky infrastructure of national borders. SEM Ethnomusicologists should know better than to go down this path. There has been no shortage of prominent writings in the past twenty years that powerfully describe the shortcomings of an area studies paradigm in our field (see, for example, Witzleben 1997 and Stokes 2008). The decision to subdivide music by region or country is at best arbitrary and at worst an imitation of aggressive techniques of Euro-American statecraft. Music (qua practice), like the human societies that activate it, does not move like matter; it cannot be bottled or vacuumed or blueprinted. Nor is music ineffable, but territorial classifications put us on the wrong effing track. What happens when we reify the presence of music in digital “space,” much as we have with music in geopolitical space? During my research on Red Shirt protest music in Thailand, the use of digital devices was common, but I was struck by the uneven character of my friends’ use of such mediating forms. Some stepped nimbly through what we might call the cosmopolitan web, filming sing-alongs and strategically posting them on Facebook, YouTube, and Vimeo. Others trawled the comparative underworld of serithai.net and uddtoday.net to grab the latest tracks by Esompo Palui and Bae Bangsanaan with achingly slow connections on their mobile phones. SMS updates announced concerts, ad-pocked web boards were rumor mills about the health and legal status of musicians, and storage lockers allowed opportunistic CD vendors to earn a living reproducing albums.