All are invited to participate in this informal roundtable event with two pioneering international scholars in the field of music, new media, and society. As a point of departure, the discussion will draw on classic Marxist ideas of the crisis of over-production and streaming logics of accumulation and acceleration, all the way to AI, and the implications of this for music cultures and the environment.
Nancy and Nick will be joined by IMV staff, including Áine Mangaoang and Kyle Devine. The event will be hosted by Head of Research, Peter Edwards.
Nancy Baym is Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research New England. She studies how people understand and act with new communication technologies in their relationships. A pioneer in the field of internet research, Baym wrote some of the first articles about online community in the early 1990s. With Jean Burgess, she is the author of Twitter: A Biography (2020, NYU). Other books include Playing to the Crowd: Musicians, Audiences, and the Intimate Work of Connection (2018, NYU), Personal Connections in the Digital Age (2010, Second Edition 2014, Polity), Internet Inquiry: Conversations About Method(co-edited with Annette Markham, 2010, Sage), and Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom and Online Community (2000, Sage).
She was a co-founder of the Association of Internet Researchers and served as its second president. She has been recognized with the Frederick Williams Prize for Contributions to the Study of Communication and Technology awarded by the International Communication Association, the naming of the Nancy Baym Book Award by the Association of Internet Researchers, and an Honorary Doctorate from the Faculty of Information Technology at the University of Gothenburg. Most of her papers and more information are available at nancybaym.com.
Nick Prior is Professor of Cultural Sociology in the School of Social and Political Science at The University of Edinburgh. With interests that span urban soundscapes, social theory and the sociology of music, his work explores the myriad ways technologies are sunk into everyday cultural practices and entangled within social formations. He is author of a series of articles that explore digital mediations of popular music culture in the post-1980s period, culminating in a monograph, Popular Music, Digital Technology and Society, published by Sage in 2018. He works with sound and how sound recordings and music composition might be used to enliven our understandings of the multi-sensorial assemblages of cities like Tokyo. His next research project will be an exploration of collaborative music production in domestic and digital contexts. Read more about Nick on his profile page.