Tyler Bickford's study of kids’ usage of portable music devices in a small, rural Vermont school makes important contributions to research on the materiality of digital culture, and the role of popular music in the social life of children. It captures a technological moment which has now largely passed – standalone MP3 players have given way to smartphones; streaming is now dominant over direct file ownership – but identifies several important aspects of kids’ usage patterns that, I suspect, remain highly pertinent. Crucially, it gives a prominent space to the perspective of the young people themselves, leaving the school's adult staff ‘intentionally voiceless’ (p. 22) in order to present a rich account of the ways that these devices support friendship and playfulness in an educational setting.
In the opening chapter Bickford draws upon the work of Paul Willis and others to distinguish between the ‘instrumental’ discourse of the classroom and the ‘intimate’ discourse of the playground; a core argument running through this book is that children's musical practices contribute substantially to this ‘intimate’ discourse, and that their listening habits are in this regard highly ‘expressive’ (rather than merely receptive). Chapter one also establishes a conceptualisation of ‘childhood’ as an identity category, laying the groundwork for another key theme by considering the ways in which childhood is constructed with reference to the competing frames of ‘education’ and ‘entertainment’.
Chapter two is the first of four chapters that draw heavily on fieldwork (largely observation, but with some novel methods such as asking kids to draw representations of musical space), and considers the role of the earbuds that are used in conjunction with MP3 players in order to question the well-established notion that portable music players promote an individualistic form of listening. Earbuds, rather than closing off listeners into private sound-worlds as is often assumed, are frequently shared – one earbud each – between pairs of listeners who are then physically and symbolically ‘tethered’ by the cable. The consequent loss of half of the stereo output is of minimal importance, suggesting that the social practice of sharing music is what really holds value here. This offers kids new ways to demonstrate close bonds (e.g. the cooperation and coordination required to play together on a swing-set while remaining tethered), and although there are some situations in which the emphasis is on ‘negotiating status’ (p. 85), for the most part the rich, evocative material here depicts earbud sharing as a valuable and rather sweet token of sociability.
Chapter three focuses on the tangibility of MP3 players, arguing that, even though these portable music devices don't look ‘childish’, are not brightly-coloured, and seem in some sense to disavow their own materiality, ‘children constantly saw in their MP3 players the childish potential for exactly the sort of manipulability, interactivity, and movement that characterizes the rest of their material culture’ (p. 94). The pupils at Bickford's school customise and tinker with their devices in all sorts of ways, from painting them to deconstructing them entirely, and they use the functionalities of their devices (particularly the low-quality built-in microphone) in ways that manufacturers could surely never have predicted, showing a nonchalant disregard for the nascent norms of the digital music economy.
In emphasising this continuity of ‘childish’ practice Bickford is in alignment with other prominent new media scholars, such as danah boyd and Daniel Miller, who have argued that digital technologies tend to be ushered into usage-patterns that reflect specific existing cultures (i.e. American school culture), rather than acting as deterministic, paradigm-altering phenomena. While I generally agree with this level-headed perspective I do wonder whether, in identifying continuity, there is a risk of ignoring the significant changes in the kinds of childish play that are afforded by these devices. That is to say, are MP3 players good toys, or does the deliberate obfuscation of replaceable parts and built-in obsolescence that characterise these devices frustrate attempts to engage deeply and fruitfully with their materiality?
Chapter 4 addresses how children's media consumption relates to the classroom, and those occasions when teachers ‘asked schoolchildren to inhabit the identity of students and to leave behind the identity of kids’ (p. 124). Engagement with popular media and portable devices is discouraged often not because it has no benefit to the kids, but because it does not fit the IRE (initiation, response, evaluation) framework that characterises ‘appropriate’ classroom activity. Beginning in this chapter, and continuing into the next, the focus shifts away from music somewhat and towards video games (portable consoles being the other prominent technological devices in the school), and therefore this material may be of less interest to a Popular Music readership. Chapter 5 returns to and elaborates upon the distinction between ‘instrumental’ discourse and kids’ culture, arguing that the latter is distinguishable by its tendency to be ‘inappropriate’ and ‘inarticulate’ (i.e. relying heavily on context and on peers’ familiarity with popular media).
The identification of instrumental educational approaches as a key problematic means that the relationship between children and media and technology firms is relatively underexplored, which is frustrating given that there are hints towards a pernicious industry at work in propagating ecologically and economically detrimental forms of consumerism. For example, one section opens by noting that ‘[l]ike a lot of objects sold to children, the generic MP3 players that most of the HCS kids had were cheap, even disposable’ (p. 99), but then moves on swiftly to the valuable ways in which kids re-appropriate their devices. Media conglomerates are seen here as largely working on the same side as the children, who utilise content from popular media in order to generate their powerfully ‘intimate’ discourse, which is implicitly understood as constituting a positive disruption to ‘instrumental’ interactions within the classroom.
Readers arriving from a musicological background may find the lack of attention paid to musical specifics disappointing. This omission is understandable, given the book's aim to ‘de-privilege music as a separate space of aesthetic enjoyment’ in order to better understand its ‘privileged role in everyday interactions and communications that produce and reproduce social identities and relationships’ (p. 20), but at times leads to a fairly wholesale dismissal of the role of aesthetics in children's musical culture. It is fascinating to learn that cultural capital seemingly plays no role, and that kids’ song choices appear to be ‘random and unstructured’ (p. 138), but of course aesthetics are not entirely reducible to cultural capital. When earbuds are being shared, or when songs are being recorded, lo-fi style, across devices, it is surely pertinent that it is this song, rather than that song. The apparent absence of aesthetic judgements might be a consequence of research design – Bickford was with the kids exclusively during school, which (if my own school experience is at all representative) is seldom a time for deep listening and reflection on musical meaning.
This book is a highly interdisciplinary work, taking theoretical inspiration from childhood studies, media and communication, and popular music and cultural studies, and as such even an expert in any one of these fields will find new approaches and thought-provoking material here. Bickford's depictions of school life are compelling and engaging, and his affection for both the kids and their wider school community is clearly evident throughout. The final pages of the book note that, a short while after fieldwork was concluded, the school imposed a full ban on media devices. Clearly, then, we remain wary of the potential that MP3 players and smartphones hold to disrupt existing constructs of childhood and education. Schooling New Media offers a welcome insight into the reality of young people's experiences living with these devices, suggesting that the kids will most probably be alright.
