The Rules Of The Game #1: Joining In

[koganbot]

Hurrah, I've been given a column (first one here: The Rules Of The Game #1: Joining In) at the Las Vegas Weekly website, where I can actually get paid to write stuff I've always wanted to write - to ask questions, basically, and to intellectualize to my heart's content. The column runs every Thursday* with a brief minicolumn update on Mondays. I welcome your commentary: in fact, will need it, since my hope for the Monday minicolumns is that at least some of them will have me addressing people's comments about the previous Thursday's column.

*The especially sharp-eyed among you will notice that today is Friday, not Thursday. The Las Vegas Weekly is revamping its website and going through something of a shakedown cruise, so things don't always go up in a timely fashion. Some future Thursdays may also end up as Fridays, and some Mondays will be Tuesdays.

EDIT: Here are links to all but three of my other Rules Of The Game columns (LVW's search results for "Rules of the Game"). Links for the other three (which for some reason didn't get "Rules Of The Game" in their titles), are here: #4, #5, and #8.

UPDATE: I've got all the links here now:

http://koganbot.livejournal.com/179531.html

Comments

[koganbot]

Being the new kid in town, I probably won't be making many suggestions about how they should organize their Webpages. One thing I noticed is that their search engine is close to worthless; I go through google and then (since all their URLs have changed) read from the cache. Anyway, it may make more sense to have the convos here than at the site.

An important comment of yours was: "if we are inclining towards metal, we are more likely to end up having rewarding conversations with other metal fans, and less rewarding ones with people who like other stuff. This can mean we are more keen to hang out with the metal fans."

So what happens here is a reinforcement mechanism; you start with a preference, not necessarily that strong ("I tend to like metal-sounding stuff"); this leads to your talking to more metalheads, learning more about the metal you already know - which generally leads to your liking it more - and learning more about other metal and about what your metal friends like and dislike and the reasons they give. And of course they learn from you and your own tastes and reasons. So, that some people have some tastes in common can lead to many people having very particular tastes in common. And of course the things in common won't only be musical: without necessarily even thinking about it you'll pick up each other's verbal habits, and more consciously you may start making similar clothing choices. And so forth.

The reason I wanted to bring in chaos theory and complexity theory (if those are even the right terms) is that there's a potential random element in this. Let's say everyone in a classroom likes three types of music. So you like metal and prog and funk, all about equally; the guy sitting to your right likes metal, country-rock, and oldies; and the guy to your left likes metal, singer-songwriter music, and glam. Now, what you have in common is metal, so those tastes reinforce each other, you each become sources of info for the other two, etc. So that's how a small preference can turn into a big liking, and a part of your identity. Of course, in real life preferences aren't random anyway; but this is how things tend to cluster.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking about randomness a bunch...but another point I made (and articulated more clearly on Bedbugs) was that the deck is stacked toward "like," and rather than think of taste in terms of "like" and "dislike," it might be more balanced to think of it in terms of "like" and "ignore."

Not to say we can't legitimately dislike things (and for no seemingly justifiable reason plenty of the time) but that we very seldom dislike, say, a genre because we have actively listened to it and have decided it's all crap. Also that where we "dislike" something based on little information, we are most likely to radically change, given a new set of social variables -- new friends. new radio stations, new clothes, new clubs. I thought I disliked _____, but turned out I'd never really listened to it! I doubt this is a very common event, because I'd guess that people don't LIKE to radically change "who they are" (their friends, their clubs, their radio stations") all that often.

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

Yes, all that is true. I'm not sure the random element much connects to chaos or complexity. Certainly chaos theory's famous butterfly effect applies - that desk seating accident reinforces the metal tastes, and can redirect your life in all kinds of ways - and maybe its models and strange attractors and so on seem likely to apply to musical tastes, but I don't think anyone has done any work on that yet, possibly because it's pretty hard to measure, quantify, formulate. I would expect that if someone did do a study, for example by asking a large number of kids their favourite kind of music before starting senior school then at the end of the first year, and extending that to who they hung out with and such things, we would see patterns that resemble those of chaos theory, but it would have to be a very large study for this to be confirmed. I think the details of how tastes are formed and changed is too complex for any scientific mapping we are capable of, just as the human mind is.

Complexity theory is more about complex emergent traits arising out of what seems like simple beginnings - it seems to say a great deal about how life could have started and progressed, and it's easy to see musical subcultures and genres as examples of emergent complexity, but again I don't know that we can currently go any further than 'this seems a bit like this scientific model', and I am uneasy with trying to take it anywhere. Science hasn't got terribly far with linking music with these theories (there has been some interesting work on fractals and birdsong), let alone the cultural aspects of music.

One other point that has always interested me is that even when people like similar things, it's often for very different reasons. We can find things something like Thomas Kuhn's incommensurable paradigms even in groups apparently well in synch with each other. As an example, not about music, I recall a discussion among friends after South Park and King Of The Hill both started on UK TV close together. We were all big Simpsons fans, and all watching these new shows. Most of us liked South Park better. My oldest friend, Dave, was amazed. "How can you like that so much? Stan and Kyle are the only remotely interesting, convincing characters - on King of the Hill, all the characters are superbly rounded." "Because South Park is really funny and King of the Hill isn't!" one person said. "Oh I don't care about that," said Dave dismissively, as if that was obviously a point of no relevance and he was surprised anyone would imagine it could be.

The same thing happens with music. Two people like lots of the same things, but not for the same reasons. There are countless reasons for enjoying music, and even when they lead you to the same recordings, that doesn't mean your reasons are the same. I mention this because it's another factor in developing tastes - the people you hang out with don't just guide you to the stuff they like, they can prompt you to change how you listen, what you value, and what you don't. This can be as simple as listening more to the lyrics or the guitar playing or the harmonics or whatever, or more specifically for emotion or irony or literary references or wit in the lyrics, and so on. You get better at noticing these things, you learn to enjoy them more, you can turn more against things that lack them - or lack them in the ways you can spot, and so on. It's all hugely complex. This is why it is so hard - as we know from the League of Pop - to guess what someone else will like. I scored well with you, but I was still caught by surprise by some of the thinks you liked or didn't like or didn't connect with.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Places like Facebook (and the Watts experiment that was in the NYT a few weeks ago) have gone to some lengths to use online communities to find such information. I'm sure major marketing departments at major labels and film companies have used similar methods to systematically determine "taste." I'm thinking specifically of a place called Pop Generation, which is a thinly veiled PR site for Hollywood Records (among other major labels), who use a fan community to get stat information about who's listening to their music. (Which, through a glitch in their web layout, you can access with a series of simple html changes.)

But the Watts experiment is one of the only I know of to try to systematically determine randomness, whereas PopGen et al are trying to calculate probably tastes. And looking at their stats, you see all kinds of weird stuff happening -- no one listens to Paris Hilton, for example, because no one has joined the fan community, whereas there's easily a sample base of upwards of 10,000 for Aly and AJ alone.

Would be interested to know when taste DOESN'T cluster -- which is what interests me about artists like Paris and Ashlee -- and Frank with the New York Dolls, "making their audience," for whom the cluster is yet to exist as a "cluster." Forming new clusters = forming new communities?

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

*probable, not "probably tastes"

[koganbot]

even when people like similar things, it's often for very different reasons

Actually, this points up what I think is the major problem with the way I worded my question, "How is it that individual visceral responses align - or realign - so that members of the same social group respond similarly to music?" In fact, the visceral responses don't have to align; all they need do is bring about the same result: We all like metal! But the reason I needed the phrase "visceral response" was to emphasize that the individuals were liking metal for apparently internal reasons (liking the sound, being moved by the rhythm), that they weren't liking the music just so that they could all like the same thing, which is simply too weak a reason to like something, to feel the music. And it's interesting that I use the phrase "visceral response" to encapsulate a whole bunch of reasons including "I'm taken intellectually and emotionally by the lyrics" and "I'm fascinated by the music's form." But the brain is part of the body, and the word "visceral" really does serve my purposes.

I don't know if "chaos" and "complexity" are the only relevant words (Duncan Watts calls his field "the science of networks), but my (limited) understanding is that the people interested in such theories are also interested in how complexity can sometimes produce simple results - e.g., everyone in our group likes metal, even though what causes each individual to like metal is varied and complex.

I'm bringing up the random element to counter my generally admirable tendency to give deep social and psychological reasons for the appeal of popular music and explain why this appeals to lots of people now, and that doesn't. Those social and psychological reasons are powerful, and I intend to explore how they exert their subterranean pull. But we need to remind ourselves that there really is an element of chance, e.g., in the fact that three metal fans happened to get seat assignments near one another.

Let's suppose that once our three youngsters discover their common liking for metal, and under each other's influence expand and deepen their knowledge and love of the music, they come to the attention of other kids, some of whom also like metal and so gravitate towards these three. So in effect these three have become the opinion leaders. But this isn't necessarily owing to any leadership quality in the three, but just to there being three of them and their constituting a noticeable clump.

And if this were happening in real life, a followup questions would be: what happens to these kids' other tastes? Do the kids become interested in the nonmetal music that their metal friends like, developing broad, eclectic tastes? Or do the other musics get shunted aside, an individual kid spending more time on metal and less on his other (former?) likes? This could go either way, but I can see how the latter can happen, my own behavior on the teenpop thread being an example: I started it in January 2006 mainly so I could have somewhere to talk about Ashlee and Lindsay and Kelly (I was already talking about them on the country thread, for lack of a better place), and maybe Marion and Marit if they were to resurface (and man, they did). But as things developed I ended up exploring a whole bunch of other performers, some really good, some not; but overall, since I was examining them more deeply, I got a greater appreciation of that musical area as a whole, hence a deeper liking of the performers, which reinforced my interest. And the time spent on teenpop did take away from crunk and hyphy and country. And - going back to our hypothetical classroom - I can imagine some metal nonfans disparaging the metal that our metalheads like; and if some of these metal nonfans are fans of Eagles-style country, I can imagine the metal fan who also likes the Eagles to start veering away from that music. Not that the Eagles would suddenly sound bad to him, but he might feel a sourness towards that type of music, so no longer explore it as much.

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

There is lots more than that causing the taste for the Eagles to shrink. He's not getting the reinforcement from his friends; he is not getting the discourse, which is both an extra dimension of enjoyment for metal and a way to get more out of the music itself, by understanding it better; he is probably getting direct discouragement from the metalheads who think the Eagles are pussies, and peer pressure (to like the same things, to dislike the same things, to not be a pussy) may not be a reason to like or dislike something on its own, but it is surely a contributing factor; he is not sharing this with his friends, or getting them playing other country-AOR to round out his experience; when he is alone, there is more incentive to play the new metal album, to become expert in it, rather than to further explore his non-shared tastes; and yes, he thinks the Eagles fans he knows are twats, and doesn't want to be associated with them, and if liking the Eagles also means liking Garth Brooks or whatever, then maybe he would prefer to stay away from them; perhaps his parents or other relatives find the Eagles kind of pleasant, but hate the metal he plays, which is another good reason to play the metal - and to turn it up.

That's not exhaustive, but it's a decent start towards sufficient reason to lose interest in them, to look back on this foolish young taste (and this connects to Mark's Seven Ages point below) with a bit of embarrassed contempt. There are so many dimensions to this kind of thing.