Children’s Music, MP3 Players, and Expressive Practices at a Vermont Elementary School: Media Consumption as Social Organization among Schoolchildren Tyler Bickford Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2011 © 2011 Tyler Bickford All rights reserved Abstract Children’s Music, MP3 Players, and Expressive Practices at a Vermont Elementary School: Media Consumption as Social Organization among Schoolchildren Tyler Bickford Over the last generation changes in the social structure of the family and children’s command of an increasing share of family spending have led marketers to cultivate children as an important consumer demographic. The designation “tween,” which one marketer refers to as kids “too old for Elmo but too young for Eminem,” has become a catchall category that includes kids as young as four and as old as fifteen. Music marketed to children—led by the Disney juggernaut, which promotes superstar acts such as the Jonas Brothers and Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus across television, radio, film, DVDs and CDs, and branded toys, clothing, and electronics—represents a rare “healthy” area of the music industry, whose growth has paralleled the expansion of portable media technologies throughout U.S. consumer culture. The increasing availability of portable media devices, along with the widespread installation of Internet terminals in schools and educators’ turn toward corporate- produced “edutainment” for lessons, has reconfigured schools as central sites of children’s media consumption. Off-brand MP3 players packaged with cheap and brightly colored earbuds have become more and more affordable, and marketers increasingly target kids with celebrity-branded music devices and innovations like Hasbro’s iDog series of toy portable speakers, which fit naturally among children’s colorful and interactive collections of toys. At the forefront of the “digital revolution, children are now active—even iconic—users of digital music technologies. This dissertation argues that tweens, as prominent consumers of ascendant music genres and media devices, represent a burgeoning counterpublic, whose expressions of solidarity and group affiliation are increasingly deferred to by mainstream artists and the entertainment industry. We appear to be witnessing the culmination of a process set in motion almost seventy years ago, when during the postwar period marketers experimented with promoting products directly to children, beginning to articulate children as a demographic identity group who might eventually claim independence and public autonomy for themselves. Through long-term ethnographic research at one small community of children at an elementary school in southern Vermont, this dissertation examines how these transformations in the commercial children’s music and entertainment industry are revolutionizing they way children, their peers, and adults relate to one another in school. Headphones mediate face-to- face peer relationships, as children share their earbuds with friends and listen to music together while still participating in the dense overlap of talk, touch, and gesture in groups of peers. Kids treat MP3 players less like “technology” and more like “toys,” domesticating them within traditional childhood material cultures already characterized by playful physical interaction and portable objects such as toys, trading cards, and dolls that can be shared, manipulated, and held close. And kids use digital music devices to expand their repertoires of communicative practices—like passing notes or whispering—that allow them to create and maintain connections with intimate friends beyond the reach of adults. Kids position the connections and interactions afforded by digital music listening as a direct challenge to the overarching goals around language and literacy that structure their experience of classroom education. Innovations in digital media and the new children’s music industry furnish channels and repertoires through which kids express solidarity with other kids, with potentially transformative implications for the role and status of children’s in their schools and communities. Contents List of illustrations iii Acknowledgements iv Introduction 1 Heartsboro 3 Methods 5 Rural New England, rusticity, and provincialism 9 Some notes on terms and categories 11 Musical taste 17 MP3 players at HCS 19 Media, language, and poetics 22 Studying popular music and popular music audiences 25 Childhood 29 Chapter summary 37 Chapter 1—Where Are the Childhoods in the Anthropology of Education? An Expressive Practices Approach to Intimacy and Instrumentality 43 Expressive practices, schooling, and the social reproduction of inequality 45 Instrumental language: IRE, objectification, decontextualization, and literacy education 55 Essayist literacy and instrumentality 62 Dialectics of intimacy and estrangement 64 Instrumental and intimate expressivities 69 Childhood matters in schooling 70 Social construction of childhood, development, and pedagogy 74 Children’s culture and expressive traditions: phantasmagoria, friendship, play 77 Childhood takes intimacy as its organizing principle; childhood looks a lot like class 84 Chapter 2—Children’s Music, “Tweens,” and Identity (Politics) 89 Kids Rule! or, children and media industries unite 93 Be-“tween” childhood and adolescence 97 Making pop music childish: Kidz Bop 100 Making children’s music pop: The Disney Channel 107 Can the biggest acts in the country be between anything? 114 Solidarity 120 A tween counterpublic? 122 Coda: Bringing entertainment media into an expressive practices framework 129 Chapter 3—Earbuds Are Good for Sharing: Intimate Connections and the Social Economy of Children’s Headphone Use in School 135 “iPod culture” and “audile technique”: Scholarly narratives of sonic fragmentation 139 “Digital natives” and Internet sociality 145 i Social connection 151 Sharing earbuds in a group: earbuds trace out relative affinity 154 Across gender boundaries 158 Other modes of listening 162 Stratification and exclusion 163 Children pull audile technique inside out 169 Chapter 4—Tinkering and Tethering: MP3 Players and Children’s Material Culture 172 Childish things: technology, music, and children’s material culture 173 New media devices as childish things 177 Tethering 181 Breaking 185 Enlivening 188 Tinkering 190 Tinkering and tethering in the circulation of recordings 193 Sound as material culture 199 Chapter 5—Intimate Media, Video Games, and Sociality in the Classroom 203 Music listening in the classroom 207 Video games in the classroom: layering, interaction, attention 212 Media, “multitasking,” and social differentiation 219 Chapter 6—Inappropriate and Inarticulate: Portable Media Devices and Expressive Practices in School 222 Expressive repertoires 223 Inappropriate 231 Inarticulate 240 Conclusion 252 Kids’ rules 252 Social capital and cultural capital 254 Education versus consumerism 258 Childhood and schooling specifically problematize these boundaries 263 School rules 266 References 269 ii List of illustrations Figure 1—Sharing earbuds 137 Figure 2—Randy tore apart his “melted” earbuds to see what’s inside 191 Figure 3—“A good redneck way to do it” Randy marked the left earbud with a Confederate flag sticker 192 Figure 4—Kathy’s Christmas MP3 player in June, taped up and covered in nail polish 193 Figure 5—Third-grader Robby’s drawing of Christmas at his family’s house, showing his sister Amber (left) and himself singing songs from the movie High School Musical 2, as their mother (center) calls for them to “stop singing” and a radio plays a Hannah Montana song in the bottom right corner. Used by permission. 205 Figure 6—Sixth-grade girls listening to “Bad Touch” on Becky’s MP3 player 233 iii Acknowledgements This dissertation would not have been possible without the participation, friendship, support, advice, encouragement, and help of many people. I am most indebted to the kids at HCS, who made me welcome in their community and treated me like a friend. Spending a year teaching, talking, playing, laughing, and listening to music with them stands out as one of the great experiences of my life. I learned an enormous amount from them, only a small part of which is included in this dissertation, but I sincerely hope that my efforts at thinking through how they make communities with one another reflects at least some small bit of the actual substance of their lives. I wish I could thank them by name, because they deserve all the credit. The adults at HCS also welcomed me, treated me as a friend and colleague, and found ways for me to be useful. They made this research possible and enjoyable, and they made me feel like I could contribute to their school’s mission. It is very difficult to express how much I owe to my advisor, Aaron Fox, whose ideas inform every corner of this dissertation, and who treated me like a colleague since before I deserved it. This project has been profoundly transformative for me—thinking about childhood and education has made me reconsider and rearticulate my core personal and professional values in way that I never expected but that I dearly value—and I know that I would not have arrived at this point if Aaron hadn’t given me the space to put together an unusual dissertation topic, and trusted me to make it work. I am deeply grateful to him for that. The rest of my committee has been similarly supportive. Both Tom Porcello and Susan Boynton have mentored this project for a long time, and their support and ideas have shaped it profoundly. I learned from Tom how to think about music and technology, and how to iv approach scholarship as a vocation. Susan has guided and encouraged my thinking about children’s musical lives, and she has reminded me to consider the histories, and not just the present, of school, childhood, and consumer culture. Both Pat Campbell and Jackie Marsh have encouraged this project from afar for several years, and it is an honor that they agreed to be on the committee. Pat’s work showed that there is a place in ethnomusicology for research about children, and her advice, comments, and support have been incredibly valuable.