[Air-l] last.fm group

[Bruce Mason]

On 29/05/07, Nancy Baym <nbaym at ku.edu> wrote:
>
> >The
> discussions of this on the forums is interesting, because some people
> are really offended by the fact that others do it, while still others
> find it very hard to understand why it matters. It also leads to all
> kinds of value judgements about the 'right' way to listen to music
> and the right to judge how others' listen.
>
That is a fascinating little wrinkle; it gives an interesting insight into
emergent, contested group norms. The profile snippets you quoted indicate
that the dimensions of the debate are pretty well known albeit, pretty well
known to those who actively participate in the site rather than just
scrobbling music. Although I don't think there's anything surprising going
on, it does look like a great example of how group norms emerge, are
contested and are expressed on a web2.0 site.

Relatedly, I came across a bit of net art based on LastFM recently. The
artist had created a set of characters via the wiki and through scrobbling a
bunch of music over 24 hours managed to create an imaginary dialogue. This
of course hints at one of the challenges of looking at this stuff: the wide
variety of idiosyncratic uses to which it is put.

Bruce