Experts, dads and technology Gendered talk about online music

Abstract

With the internet and digital media technology increasingly central to practices around music, this shift is often seen as contributing to a networked music use characterized by individualism. Drawing on a focus group study with young adults in Stockholm and Moscow, this article argues, however, that digital music use today is shaped by discourses of difference, with gender a significant factor both in constructions of the ideal music and technology user, and in terms of musical influence and guidance. Taking into account contemporary research on new media technology, as well as feminist studies of technology and music, the article questions ideas of a neutral user of new music technologies, showing how the gendering of music and media technology can be seen as simultaneously context-bound and cutting across geographies.