This week's readings consider the concept of collaboration in relation to virtuality.
Community and Collaboration
Building off of last week's discussion of community, Carroli argues for the centrality of collaboration in considering how community is constructed, shaped, and maintained. Drawing upon Sandy Stone, Carroli argues that:
virtual community is…as Sandy Stone put it, "first and foremost a community of belief”
In practice, however, Carroli argues that belief turns to action as community members collaborate via various modes of communicative action. In fact:
In a virtual environment, collaboration displaces community, teasing out, as it seems to do, the possibility of radical encounters with the "other.”
In other words, for Carroli collaboration becomes the primary means by which virtual communities exist. To further this argument, she draws upon Raymond Williams to argue that collaboration is, in effect, a process of communication. While Carroli is not dealing with music, per se, this concept of communication as central to collaboration in cyberspace, for our purposes, may be situated within musical practices, given conceptualizations of music as essentially a mode of communication.
Consent and Anonymity
One of the potential problems with conceptualizing virtual interactions (that is, social relations technologically reconfigured via manipulations of space and time) as collaborative is recognizing the limits to possibility of anonymity in cyberspace and the problem of consent within asynchronous interactions. At the end of her article, Carroli raises a basic tenet of online sociality:
“In cyberspace, anonymity renders everyone who enters a stranger and also strangers to each other.”
Anonymity, coupled with issues of consent, are highly problematic, yet left unexplored by Oliver. If sampling is a collaborative relationship, the often anonymous, disembodied musical statements articulated through the music incorporating the sample raises red flags in terms of consent.
The Return of Musicking
Considering the processual and socially-oriented notion of collaboration shared by both Carroli and Oliver, Small's concept of musicking returns again as a powerful idea for understanding music and virtuality. As pointed out by Oliver, these issues are not inherently connected to the Internet, or even digital, but can be extended to fundamental understandings of virtual and the actual.
Questions
- How is collaboration inherently political? What sort of political issues arise through process of musical collaboration? How are these issues especially problematic in the cybercultural realm?
- In what ways does Oliver suggest that the concept of virtuality is embedded in the process of sampling?
- How does Oliver's suggestion of sampling as collaboration differ from Shaviro's concept of sampling as "cultural hacking"?
- How is the musical practice of call-and-response inherently collaborative? How is sampling and remixing conceptualized as a process of call-and-response?
The concept of "community" has come up over the last few weeks. Carroli directly addresses the issues that arise with the labeling of virtual environments as "communities." In the traditional sense of the word community, virtual platforms share similarities with face-to-face communication (community). However, aspects such as geography and permanence conflict; or, according to Carroli, "…deny and falsify difference." Another issue discussed by Carolli is anonymity. This is where Carolli's primary argument is synthesized, which is also perhaps the most convincing section of the article. This concept of a "community of strangers" is both a contradiction and an accurate representation of the state of the users and their interactions. As Carroli states, "My proposition is that the Internet can operate as "another place" in which one can lose oneself, and that being caught up with others involves a collaborative encounter rather than a consensual one."
The Oliver text offers evidence for the consideration of sampling as a form of "musicking," in Small's terminology.
The discussion of the different forms of collaboration, most notably found in hip-hop music, provide a background for sampling as a reflection musicking. However, I agree with the notion that Oliver ignores the potential issues of legality and consent in the heightening of this process to the level of any other form of musicking.
Carroli takes an interesting perspective on community in her writing. She advocates collaboration and celebration of differences over finding common ground or consensus. She says it is important "to make the sound of our identities count as we work to contract communities of caring, to technologize and transfer ourselves in the care of others." Politically, we are often grouped into an us vs. them phenomenon, and our voting system specifically focuses on finding consensus, or what the largest number of people agree upon. This idea of caring for and collaborating with those who are different in order to bring out and celebrate these differences paints a different picture from our current political climate. Yet, collaboration, whether in music or in other areas, does have political aspects, as some people tend to be leaders while others are followers, creating a power dynamic. In its purest form, collaboration could allow for many voices to be heard, yet this is not always the case. In cyberculture, social norms are somewhat different in that there is less accountability. When you are sitting at your computer and communicating with someone who you likely will never meet face to face, there are fewer consequences for your actions. Thus, people may act in a less filtered and respectful manner than they would in person. Also, unequal distribution of technology and resources to those who have power/money vs those that do not can further widen this divide.
Oliver brings us back to Small's concept of musicking, suggesting that virtual creation of music allows more and/or different people to engage in the process of musicking. Through sampling, musical ideas can be shared from one person to the next, adapted, and built upon in a way that was not possible prior to this technology. This allows for individuals running technological platforms, creating samples, operating digital technologies, etc to have as much of a role in musicking as do the individuals who played instruments or sang to create the original sample. In relation to the idea of call-and-response, collaboration is critical. One musician responds to another in a communicative way, which could not be done without collaboration. It is, essentially, the very foundation upon which this type of music is built. Sampling and remixing are a form of this, in that musicians are responding to and building upon one another. However, call-and-response happens in real time, allowing for face-to-face collaboration and listening. Additionally, this is more of a two-way interaction, while sampling and remixing may be one-sided, such as when a musician takes a sample from someone else who has died. While the living musician benefits from this collaboration, the original creator does not.
In Oliver’s Bring That Beat Back Sampling as Virtual Collaboration, virtual aspects have been explored in many levels, especially in sampling and the solo groove of breakbeats. He points out that the process of disembodiment in sampling is one of the cores for categorising and determining whether it contains virtual elements or not. In this respect, the concept of collaboration also shifts, the word ‘collaboration’ was understood as two musicians/artists/individuals who work together at the same time; however, through sampling, collaborative works occur among different generations of musicians and artists, music from the past present fresh sources for newer generations of musicians. Therefore, “musicking” is created, and not limited to specific space and time. I think this concept ties in directly to the remix 2 assignment, as I work on the project, I experience “call-and-response” notion in remixing a friend’s work, interpreting the underlying meanings in the music, and building upon musical ideas that are given, I also think that this remixing process is one of the examples of musical collaborations that technologies bring in. In my opinion, I view the act of collaboration or musicking in remix also extends to the software provider such as GarageBand, and the performers, composers, and individuals who involves in making music available online, I think they can be called collaborators, as the availabilities of sources and the loops in GarageBand are integral in this collaborative process. The following statement rings true in regards to collaborative work in today's society;
"in the musicking that occurs when a hip-hop producer engages with fragments of existing music/performances from the past via sampling, a kind of virtual collaboration becomes possible for musicians working across temporal, geographical, and stylistic boundaries” (Oliver)
Carroli's writing speaks not only to the building of more collaborative and supportive communities on the Internet, not just those that are inherently musical. Although these communities find their cornerstones in communication and primary interests, the issue of ephemerality (the disembodiment and lack of physical temporality) still de-stabilizes any arguments for the validity of Internet community. Even so, Linda Carroli also seems to advocate for the construction of groups whose central focus is identity and mobilization towards a common goal (though perhaps not explicitly under the guise of community). In identity-centric spaces today, politics are inescapable, as any form of output by a unit that opposes the majority could be seen as contentious. The ephemerality of these spaces, however, causes these communications to lose significance, though lacking in the reservations typical of physical interaction.
Oliver's understanding of sampling does indeed fall in line with Small's hopes for musicking. However, like some earlier discussions of sampling and collaborative music production, Oliver's article still fails to observe the artistic license of the original producer. Even more so, it may even go so far as to cut the original producer out of the discourse occurring between the people examining and remixing their work. "Call and response" might be more fitting of an initial remix, if the producer is somehow involved in a collaboration and the subsequent conversations circulating around it.
In regard to communities and the issues that raise when assessing networks that almost exclusive thrive and grow within a virtual environment, we must look into what aspects are required to form a community. Carroli talks about these conflicts and proposes alternative ideas to what might be instinctual when defining communities. While differences surface and often generate opposing identities, usually in the case of political position, we look to these differences to define us as individuals within a larger community, and as musicians, we see this as personal preference rather than conflicting chaos. In regard to the idea of collaboration, we use these differences to bring strengths and weaknesses to the creative process. As with other situations of group communication, collaboration relays on a certain dynamic of strengths and leaders to take charge, and a certain amount of weakness or followers to continue the process and provide what they can where they can. This brings back the subject of musiking by drawing on the basic understanding that many things are essential to the production of music that are inherently un-musical, but still serve an important functional purpose to the music making as a whole.
Carroli talks about the centrality of collaboration, breaking down how community is constructed, shaped, and maintained. She says that a virtual community is first and foremost a community of belief. Which echoes what we learned during our previous discussion of community, which is a community is simply a group of people who come together via a common belief. This is something that I totally agree with because if you take the example of Balance Breakfast that I did my report on you can see plain as day that they came together via a common belief in creating a place where a music professionals and performers can do what they love while making money doing it. This also turned into action with them banning together to help each other with booking and other things of need. This also makes me agree with Carroli when she talks about belief turning into action as community members collaborate via modes of communicative action.