Podcast appearances and mentions of Nancy Baym

In this episode Elizabeth chats with TikTok creator and researcher T.X. Watson about parasocial relationships and how this term created in the 1950s applies, or not, to digital content creators. T.X. talks about relationships between influencers and their followers and how both research and popular culture still don't have words to properly describe this new form of connection. They discuss important topics that show up throughout this season of Wonks and War Rooms, such as authenticity, ethics, co-creation and measuring influence.Side note: We are collecting examples of impacts of the podcast and we'd love to hear from you. Could you take two minutes to fill out this short questionnaire for feedback on the podcast.Additional Resources:Elizabeth and T.X. mention the 1950s research by Horton and Wohl that defined the concept of parasocial relationships. They explain the term in their article  Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance Elizabeth talks about how some researchers are discussing the use of the term parasocial relationships to talk about influencers and proposing alternatives. One alternative is given by Lou in the article  Social Media Influencers and Followers: Theorization of a Trans-Parasocial Relation and Explication of Its Implications for Influencer Advertising T.X. mentions Nancy Baym's book "Playing to the Crowd", but you can also check her out in conversation with Daniel Cavicchi and Norma Coates in this chapter on Music fandom in the digital ageT.X. mentions the Vlogbrothers John and Hank Green that have been making social media content since 2006Find T.X. Watson on TikTokCheck out past episodes mentioned in this one: News Influencers with Rachel Gilmore, Political Influencers with Nate Lubin, and Technological Affordances with Rachel Aiello Check out www.polcommtech.ca for annotated transcripts of this episode in English and French.

By Walt HickeyWelcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.This week I spoke to Kaitlyn Tiffany, the author of the new book Everything I Need I Get From You, out this week. The book is a deep dive into the nature of fandom, and how fangirls have been instrumental in the design, growth and evolution of the internet and social media. It's a great look that combines digital culture and pop culture. The book can be found wherever books are sold, and Tiffany can be found at The Atlantic and on Twitter. This interview has been condensed and edited. You are the author of the brand new book Everything I Need I Get From You. It is all about the intersection of fandom and internet culture, and how they each feed one another. What got you interested in this topic?I was part of fandom myself, which is very obvious in the book and not a secret. I spent a lot of time on Tumblr when I was 19 and 20 and 21. Then I moved to New York to start working in journalism, and I started working at a tech website that was getting into internet culture coverage. It was sort of the only thing I felt I could contribute; I didn't know anything about tech, and as soon as they were talking about expanding their cultural coverage, I was like, "well, I can do Tumblr, that's tech, right?" That was how I started reporting on fandom professionally.Later on, I knew that I wanted to do a book about fandom because there was a lot of academic work about fandom already, but there hadn't really been, I felt, a satisfying, non-academic popular press explanation of how fandom and internet culture were intertwined. It just made sense to do it through the lens of One Direction, because that was where my personal experience was, and it's really hard to parachute into a fandom that you aren't a part of at the length and level of detail that I wanted to do.I love that you took it from the point of One Direction because I feel like boy bands have this habit of really dominating an entire conversation on fandom for a while. You can almost follow different eras with them, and the era where One Direction was phenomenally popular was a super transformational one for the internet as a whole. Do you want to kind of talk about One Direction, their run, and their role in the internet's fandom history?One of the academics I talked to for the book, Allison McCracken, I actually asked her, "When did fandom start on Tumblr? How did Tumblr become the fandom platform?" And she said it's three things that happened all the same time: Harry Potter, Glee and One Direction. Those three fandoms were huge in the early days of Tumblr, and I think really Glee and One Direction in particular, really solidified the visual culture of fandom, the tradition of making really elaborate gif sets and also of shipping. Shipping was huge. Anybody who doesn't know what that is, it's fan fiction, imaginative relationship pairings between characters. I want to get into that a little bit later, too, cause that's a huge part of this, but yeah, go on.Totally. That was huge with Glee fandom and it was also big with One Direction fandom. Numerous famous pairings in One Direction fandom. Then with Twitter, I think One Direction just kind of coincidentally came along at the same moment when teenagers and younger than teenagers were joining Twitter. Those were really the first big years of Twitter having a youth culture. I think it was the combination of those two things, and then also sort of an underlooked part of the One Direction history, I think, is how much the YouTube algorithm was driving people to One Direction. I heard that from so many people that I interviewed who started out as just watching whatever pop music videos, and getting recommended the One Direction videos. Then, crucially with One Direction, there was just so much content that it was really easy to fall down a rabbit hole, if you will. Once you got done watching all their music videos, with another pop star, you'd be like, "Oh, well that was fun, but there's nothing else to look at right now. I guess I'll have to wait." But One Direction was constantly putting out behind-the-scenes stuff on YouTube in a way that was on a much quicker pace, I think, than other pop stars were up to that point. Part of their allure was that they were just really rambunctious and irreverent to the idea of marketing, and it felt really immediate and genuine and authentic, which was something people really craved, the ability to connect directly or feel like they were connecting directly with celebrities at that time.The book is just so phenomenal. I thought it was really interesting because one of the bigger ideas now is parasocial relationships where fans feel that they have a specific relationship to an artist of various different degrees of fame. It felt like they were just some of the first folks to really monetize that and capitalize on that and really engage with their fans to almost encourage that at times, at least at the pop star level.I think it's hard to know, too, how much of that was actually deliberate and how much of that was just the fact that they were also teenagers and also just kind of wanted to be on Twitter and on social media. I think it was genuinely fun for them — maybe not for their whole career, I think there's definitely a point where it became less fun for them — but at the beginning I think they were just so shocked to be famous that they were like, yeah, let's record to front-facing camera video diaries all the time. Why not? And respond to people's tweets. And tweet about what kind of cereal we're eating for breakfast and whatever. Why wouldn't we? Everyone loves it.I loved how you really tie the development and the creation of internet culture to dominant musical acts at the time. I love the part that you wrote about the Grateful Dead and the early, early internet. Do you want to talk a little bit about the old days so to speak and what role music played in forming how internet subcultures form?Obviously that part of the book was not from firsthand experience, it was from historical research because that was before I was allowed to use the internet or even knew what the internet was. I actually have the book right behind me, The Virtual Community, which is the history of the WELL, which is really fascinating and talks a lot about Grateful Dead fans in the early forums, the kind where you had to pay to use them because they had to pay for server space. The most enthusiastic participants in these early forums in California were Grateful Dead fans. One of the early operators of the WELL even said, "I think that they were kind of single-handedly keeping us afloat, keeping us in the black."I thought that was really interesting. Grateful Dead fans were huge in early online bulletin board culture and when I was doing the research for the book, it was really remarkable to see just how every step of the way, each time some new platform or some new use of the internet was created, the first people to really eagerly use it would be fans and often music fans in particular. I don't know exactly why that is, but it was pretty consistent. There was Nancy Baym, who is a researcher, an academic, and has a really great book called Playing To The Crowd that has a lot of that history in it, and I cite quite a bit in the book.I just like how the very structure of the internet at times is like you just mentioned, informed directly by the music nerds and obsessed fans that immediately rush to it and really bear out its potential.And platforms will create or kind of take shape around fandom and ultimately end up creating features or having to respond to fandom like Twitter. It's funny to go back and kind of read the news coverage of how Twitter was dealing with fans in its early years in 2009, 2010, because they were completely baffled by its energy. There's an odd tension there, because these are extremely enthusiastic and frequent users of their product. But they're also people who tend to be kind of breaking the rules or breaking the features. They're trying to game the trending topics. They're circulating content to which they do not own copyright. They are sometimes harassing people. I feel like Twitter was caught on its heels and had to really figure out how do we keep fans on the platform, but also make sure that it doesn't become completely unusable for anybody who doesn't want to participate in fandom.It definitely gets things very real for platforms very quickly. You can tell even with BTS and Army, and there was an early story with Twitter that Justin Bieber, an apocryphal story I should say, was responsible for 3 percent of their traffic for a good while there. It's just so interesting that fandom is so intense that even servers have trouble with it sometimes.Yeah, totally. I think the Justin Bieber story was funny to me because journalists who were writing about it kept saying there are specific servers in Twitter headquarters for Justin Bieber tweets. And I was like, how would that work? There's just one server that's got the song “Baby” on it. It's in charge of playing that for anybody who listens.Yeah, yeah, exactly.I do want to talk a little bit about how you mentioned that they played trending topics, they played the algorithm. You had some amazing stuff in there about how One Direction fans attempted to play the Billboard charts and attempted to do whatever was necessary to do that. Obviously Numlock is a newsletter that loves data and the stories that inform it. I love that part where it was all about the lengths that a fandom will go to to specifically exploit algorithms designed to rank what music is popular at the time. Can you talk about that?That was based on reporting that I did when I was at The Verge and I was just scrolling through my Tumblr feed being like, I've got to find something to write about. I came across fans who were posting about gifting iTunes singles, which was something that was really interesting to me. The purposes of it were several, but it was whenever there's a new One Direction song coming out — or at the time I think it was Harry Styles' first solo single — in order to boost the sales in hopes of getting him better chart performance, and also in order to engage in a spirit of community, people would sign up to gift the iTunes single to someone else because you can only buy it once yourself, but you can gift it and that also counts as a sale. But you can only gift to people who live in your country. So they made this elaborate system for pairing people up in a spreadsheet. Oh we got 30 people willing to give away iTunes singles in Brazil, do we have 30 people who will accept the gift? All of that stuff. That was very elaborate. I was really intrigued by that. Then once I was asking people about that, they started to tell me about the other things they were doing to boost the single, which I just thought were so interesting. There are the kind of obvious ones of getting everybody in the fandom to just blast radio requests on Twitter and whatever, or Shazam the song over and over so that's recommended in Shazam.Then the really interesting one was that in order to boost the song's positioning on American Billboard charts, people who did not live in the US would download VPNs and basically fake their Spotify streams so they would appear to be American Spotify streams. I think a couple of other reporters asked Spotify and Apple Music and other streaming platforms about their awareness of that kind of behavior. They definitely did not give straight answers on whether that would work. The Billboard charts similarly were kind of vague about how they determine inauthentic activity. I thought that was a fun story. I mean, obviously the number of fans who were participating was not high enough to really make a difference.Also just the basic math of how many times a person would even be able to stream the song in a day, it just didn't add up to the point where you were going to really make a dent, but it was really just funny and fun to see people trying. I thought it was really interesting that that became kind of a ritual of waiting for a single to come out, preparing to put this giant machine in action. In the final edits of the book when it was read by a lawyer at FSG, she asked me to rephrase that section a little bit, because it read too much like an instruction manual on how to do those things. And I was like, "I don't know if these things are illegal, but okay."For those who are interested, the book is called The Anarchist Cookbook For Fans. How to Blow Up A Spotify Code.Again, it's a really incredible book, folks should check it out. I would like to read my favorite two sentences from it. One Direction fans' relationship with the entertainment industry is adversarial, but mostly because they think they could run it better. Literally. In 2015, there were two separate fan efforts to buy One Direction out of their record label contract.What on earth is happening there?Yeah, I can't say that I was personally involved in that effort, but I think that's part of the fun thing about fandom, that there are things that people walk around their daily lives accepting as impossible and unrealistic. And then fans are so on the very edge between reality and fantasy that it would occur to them, well, there are millions of us, logically, and if each of us gave a few dollars, we would have many, many millions of dollars, and we could just intercede in One Direction's career. I mean, I don't have any understanding of how their contract works and I'm sure that these fans didn't either, but you can see how they got there.That's incredible. I love how you talk about some of the mechanics of fandom. You talk about how they grow fandom and how some of the platforms can encourage fandom. I also just really like how you really dive into some of the nature of obsession. We talk about conspiracy theories in fandom a lot, but in this specific case, there were a ton circling around this. It's not the first time. We're all familiar with Paul is Dead of the Beatles and whatnot, but why do you think fandom lends itself so inextricably to conspiracy theories and things like that?I think part of it is that if you are paying such close attention to something over such an extended period of time, you're going to start to notice things that seem to be important or seem to be overlooked, and pull them out. Especially in internet fandom, and especially on Tumblr, there is sort of an incentive to be the one to notice something that other fans didn't notice yet. You saw that a lot in the conspiracy theories around One Direction, which just to clarify, started with this theory that Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson, two members of the band, were secretly gay and secretly in love and secretly being forcibly closeted by their management. When it started out, a lot of people were really into it and it was fun and totally harmless.Then later it took a little bit of a darker turn, just because of the extent that people went to defend it, which involved a lot of misogynistic vitriol around the women that either one of them were dating at the time. Most darkly when Louis Tomlinson became a father, a lot of fans became convinced at first that the baby was a doll, and then later that it was either a hired actor or the child of the stepfather of the woman who Tomlinson had been dating and who was his co-parent. That obviously was over a line for some people. It didn't feel over a line for others. Once you cross that line, you can go down some interesting routes. But to return to the question of why fandom lends itself to that, I think fandom is also in opposition to mainstream media a lot of the time. The Larry Stylinson community was very defensive about any kind of media attention and with internet fandom in particular and with One Direction even more so. There is just so much to look at and to wade through and so much evidence and proof that you can find. This is something people bring up when they talk about all kinds of internet conspiracy theorizing, including QAnon or whatever else. Not that I think that there are really a lot of powerful similarities between Larry Stylinson and QAnon, but part of why people get involved in that is because it feels like anybody can participate. Anybody can find something. Anybody could be the one to have an important discovery and kind of get clout within the community. I think that's part of it, and, yeah, I mean maybe fandom also does tend to attract people who are missing some other forms of affirmation or stimulation in their life and they can dedicate a lot of time to thinking about that stuff.Even the title of the book, Everything I Need I Get From You, is a fairly direct articulation. I also want to talk a little bit about getting to the more innocuous side of some of that. The fan fiction component just really can't be ignored. Fan fiction obviously has a fairly long history, particularly obviously about fictional characters. It seems unique that particularly with One Direction, this was a situation where people and fans were writing fan fiction about actual human beings, to an extent that also now exists in other fandoms, but this felt like a kind of significant change in what fan fiction had been. Can you expand a little bit on that?Yeah. Real person fan fiction, or RPF, has always been a part of fandom, but it was a much more secretive part of fandom for a long time. There was a pretty powerful taboo against it, I would say, because a lot of fans were sort of rightfully concerned that outside eyes looking in on fandom are going to judge whatever they're doing as unhealthy and pathological. That writing about real people would attract a lot of negative attention. There was real person fan fiction, notably in the Beatles fandom, but a lot of that was disseminated only via letters. Later, real person fan fiction would've been disseminated mostly in private email list servs. It was pretty uncommon for it to just be published for broad consumption, especially in the early aughts, because platforms like fanfiction.net and then later LiveJournal put a lot of content moderation guidelines and limitations on that kind of writing and prohibited some of it.Part of the reason that One Direction was a turning point for real person fic was just that Tumblr was a turning point for real person fic. That was where a lot of fans went when they left other fan fiction writing platforms because of the limitations. They all arrived on Tumblr, and that's another reason why it became the fandom platform. I think that's another reason why the Larry Stylinson story is kind of sad, because people who were writing about Larry Stylinson in their fiction, I think a lot of them kind of felt you guys have ruined this by turning it into a conspiracy theory that embarrasses the whole fandom and makes it look like what we're doing is the same thing as what you're doing.It has also gone somewhat mainstream, in as much as fan fiction can be mainstream. Dream SMP, that's fairly large and it's about real people. If you looked at the AO3 top fan works from last year, you do see BTS show up on that, and those are real actual human beings. I don't know, it just seemed like it's gone rather mainstream, even if it was fairly taboo at one point.Yeah, totally. I, for a while, was following a lot of shipping blogs for women from the US Women's National Team soccer players. And that was really interesting to see. I didn't realize that people did RPF slash fic about sports stars.Just kind of backing out a little bit, what's something that you really learned about fandom that you didn't know going into reporting out the book?It was just really fun and interesting to talk to fans about what they got out of fandom. I found it really striking just how interesting and different they all were. Not that that was surprising in itself, but it was surprising how easy it was to get there. Part of what I talk about in the beginning of the book is this trope or this image that people have of a screaming fangirl, and that image is obviously based in reality. People do go to the concerts and scream.But it was really interesting to me and exciting that you can approach someone who ostensibly is that and ask them one question and they will tell you so many interesting things about like, what fandom means to them, their positive and negative experiences, how their relationship to fandom has changed as they've gotten older. And all that was super interesting. That part was really fun to hear about girls who, like me, cared about this thing a lot eight, nine years ago, but still are thinking through their relationship to it now as adults.What would you say your relationship is to it now?I mean, it's definitely different than it was when I was on Tumblr all the time. One Direction doesn't exist anymore, so it's different for that reason, too. But I still get really excited about whatever Harry Styles is doing, whatever Niall Horan is doing. He's actually my favorite member of One Direction. That's a way of kind of breaking up monotony of being an adult, or I guess, just a way of thinking about how my own identity has changed. I mean, I was working on the book during the pandemic, so I did a lot of just sitting in my apartment, kind of reliving being 19 and being on the internet all the time, looking at One Direction. That definitely got a little weird at times, but it was also really fun.That's amazing. The book is really fun. I enjoyed every word of it. It's called Everything I Need I Get From You. Kaitlyn, where can folks find you and where can folks find the book?I'm on Twitter @kait_tiffany. I'm also on The Atlantic under my author page, and the book you can find pretty much anywhere I think. I mean, I usually share the bookshop.org link because I think they're cool. And I have not used Amazon in five years. So don't use Amazon. Don't tell Amazon I said that.Or if you want maybe access it through a VPN and then just stream it constantly to get it up the charts.Yeah, exactly. That'd be great.If you have anything you'd like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips, or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Get full access to Numlock News at www.numlock.com/subscribe

A reminder that I've moved to a once-a-month webinar format, held on the third Thursday of the month at 4:00 p.m. Eastern. The topic is different each month, and I jam-pack them full of content. To learn about the next webinar: https://mastercoachwebinars.carrd.co We're hearing a lot about “The Great Resignation” of 2021 and the volatile job market. I wanted to personally do a deep dive on this topic, and decided to share what I uncovered with you guys. According to the Labor Department, a record 4 million people quit their jobs in April 2021, starting what is called the “Great Resignation” period. People began to see their lives differently. While some realized how much time they were spending commuting and want to continue working remotely, others felt the exhaustion of digital overload and lack of connections. At the same time, companies like Apple are delaying its return to the office to October as the Delta variant surges. Employees are claiming more flexibility, defining hybrid work as the best alternative in the post-pandemic workplace to adapt to the VUCA context. A report by TINYpulse shows that 62.8% of HR leaders say that hybrid work optimizes employee performance in their organization Here are some statistics to set the stage: -According to Monster, 95% of workers are currently considering changing jobs -Microsoft Research found 41% of the global workforce is considering changing jobs -HR executives expect only 8% of employees to quit once COVID restrictions are lifted. -According to Global Workplace Analytics, the hybrid work model is here to stay; 25%-30% of the U.S. workforce will be working partially from home by the end of 2021. According to rainmakerthinking's report, “Winning the Talent Wars,” they found the following: -Voluntary unplanned turnover – the “quit rate” - is increasing -Pent-up departure demand – the “want to quit rate” is also increasing -Early voluntary departure of new hires – employed for less than 18 months – is increasing What is going on? -Workforce burnout and depression -Fear of infection, resulting in fear of returning to the workplace -Extended unemployment and other benefits – effectively de-incentivizing the workforce -Increased family care needs -Location disruption -Changes in certain industries, such as healthcare, education, and public safety -Hastened retirements and career-pausing -Postponed schooling/training/graduation, causing delayed workforce entry What are the costs? -Sales are missed, orders can't be fulfilled, services can't be delivered -Current staff members are burnt out from overcommitment -Overtime costs are increasing -Perpetual understaffing causes bad habits as employees see cutting corners as the only solution -New hires are getting the on-boarding and initial training they need to be fully engaged and productive According to “Winning the Talent Wars,” these are the top four causes of early departures: -Buyer's remorse – the employer oversold the job and made promises they can't keep out of desperation to staff their vacant positions -Inadequate on-boarding and initial training -Hand-off to an unsupportive manager -Limited flexibility “When employees, whether new hires or longer-term, decide to quit when the time is right, we call this ‘leaving in your head,” or ‘leaving without leaving.” This phenomenon is sometimes the explanation for diminished performance or bad attitude from a previously good employee.” These are the top five causes of mid-stage departures: -Overcommitment syndrome for an extended period of time – creating “siege mentality” that feels like an assault. -Disengaged or unsupportive manager -Limited flexibility -Lack of career path -Relationship conflict “As hiring soars to record levels in the post-pandemic era, quit rates are also soaring as pent-up departure demand is released.” Where are the most vacancies? Construction, manufacturing, warehousing and pharmacy jobs are now in ample supply, the firm's data shows. "The economy is still all about the pandemic," said Jed Kolko, chief economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab. "The biggest increase in job postings are those that either help get us through the pandemic or help us get out of the pandemic." The hottest jobs sectors are those that "make and move things," Kolko added. E-commerce, warehouse and delivery jobs, all of which surged during the pandemic, are now growing at an even faster clip. The number of warehouse jobs listed on Indeed as of early April was 57% above what they were before the virus struck. The broader logistics field could add as many as 4.5 million new jobs over the next five years, according to Burning Glass, a labor market analytics firm. Along with frontline jobs, like truck drivers, that includes data analysts, software engineers, project managers and other positions required to maintain supply chains, Burning Glass predicted. Factories that make goods are going through their own labor pains. Manufacturers laid off fewer workers during the first wave of COVID-19 compared with service industries. Meanwhile, consumer demand for everything from personal protective equipment to vehicles has surged, putting a squeeze on the sector.  The drive to vaccinate people against COVID-19 is also spawning job opportunities in pharmacies and other health care organizations. Across the U.S, more than 1 in 5 job openings at the end of February was in health care and social assistance, according to Labor Department data.  Which industries are still hurting? -Education -IT -Beauty & Wellness -Hospitality & Tourism Here are seven trends that the Microsoft report highlighted leaders need to know when planning a return to the office. 1. Flexible work is here to stay. 73 percent of workers surveyed want flexible remote work options to continue, while at the same time, 67 percent are craving more in-person time with their teams. Companies should consider re-designing physical spaces to accommodate hybrid work environments better 2. Leaders are out of touch with their employees. People expect their employers and leaders to empathize with their unique challenges. More one-on-one meetings and informal conversations are required, especially for remote workers. If working in hybrid work environments, face-to-face meetings can enhance the connection even more. 3. High productivity is masking an exhausted workforce. 54% feel overworked. Microsoft discovered that apart from an increase in time spent in meetings, the average Teams meeting is 10 minutes longer (up from 35 to 45 minutes). In addition, the average Teams user sends 45%  more chats per week and 42% more chats per person after hours, with 62% of meetings not planned. 4. Gen Z is at risk and will need to be re-energized. Employees ages 18-25 reported that they were more likely to struggle balancing work with life (+8 percentage points) and to feel exhausted after a typical day of work (+8 percentage points) when compared to older generations. For Gen Z's, feeling a sense of purpose and connection is essential to feel satisfied at work, but remote work makes this more challenging, especially for those new to the workforce. 5. Shrinking networks are endangering innovation. Respondents who reported weaker workplace relationships were less likely to report thriving at activities that lead to innovation. “When you lose connections, you stop innovating” said Dr. Nancy Baym, Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft. 6. Authenticity will spur productivity and well-being. At the same time that networks shrank, a good trend that started last year was increasing authentic relations with those closest to us. The research shows that 39% of people in the study said they are more likely to be their whole selves at work compared to one year ago. These more personal interactions can increase inclusion, productivity, innovation and psychological safety. 7. Talent is everywhere in a hybrid work world. Together with an increase in resignations, the marketplace is broader as companies are more eager to hire employees living on the other side of the planet. It is also more accessible for minorities, women with children, and talent residing in smaller cities that prefer remote work. Are you in the wrong job that chips away at you every day? The CareerSpring document and coaching program will help you find a job that uses your zone of genius, recognizes your value, and pays you what you're worth. If you're ready to take your job search to the next level by working with a highly experienced professional with a track record of client success, schedule a complimentary consult to learn more: https://calendly.com/lesaedwards/zoom-meetings2  

We are still in the early days of the Internet, but there is a growing sense that it's creating more problems than it’s solving. This wasn’t always the case. There was a time when we shared an overriding optimism in the Internet's capacity to make the world a better place. Creator platforms and social media platforms saw us migrate our social lives to the Internet. While allowing us to share and interact with people we never could have before, it also fragmented our experiences and relationships. There's an endless list of unintended consequences. Today's platforms were inspired by the many that preceded them — but along the way, we started to go astray. How can we make sense of where we are today? What can we understand about the decisions that were made and the structures we had in place? And, most importantly, how can the builders of new platforms that also intend to "bring the world closer together", "give everyone the power to create" or "organize the world's information" do it better? Caterina Fake, founder of Flickr, David Bohnett, founder of Geocities, and Nancy Baym, Sr. Principal Research Manager, Microsoft Research, reflect on the current state of creator platforms and social media as part of a long lineage and series of decisions that have made the Internet what it is today and discuss what today's builders should consider in the next iteration of the web. This conversation is moderated by BKC fellow Jad Esber.

In this podcast episode, Dr. Baym, Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research Lab, New England, gives us a pre-view to her upcoming keynote address at the NVivo Virtual Conference on September 23, 2020. Register for the conference here NVivo Virtual Conference

Writer and researcher, Nancy Baym, with a books-forward selection of her favourite things.

For the latest Debate, Luke Clancy gathers a Zoom panel of producers, performers and observers to hear how they see the pandemic and its aftermath reshaping performance. His guests are author Nancy Baym, journalist Cherie Hu, cellist Francesco Dillon and musician and composer, Matthew Nolan.

This panel discussion will address the topic of “Napster @ 20,” looking back from our vantage point in 2019 and examining the direct and indirect legacy of Napster over the past two decades. The panelists are Christopher Bavitz, Nancy Baym, David Herlihy, and Jennifer Jenkins. For more information about this event, visit https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/napster20-reflections-internets-most-controversial-music-file-sharing-service

“I felt like it was very important that younger women have an example of a woman who has been extremely successful in the academy and who has a life.” The post 19. Nancy Baym – Playing to the Crowd appeared first on MTF Labs.

Some people thought the laying of the transatlantic cable might bring world peace, because connecting humans could only lead to better understanding and empathy. That wasn’t the outcome, and recent utopian ideas about communication (Facebook might bring us together and make us all friends!) have also met with a darker reality (Facebook might polarize us and spread false information!). Should we be scared of technology that promises to connect the world? Guests include: Robin Dunbar, inventor of Dunbar’s Number; Nancy Baym, Microsoft researcher.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Some people thought the laying of the transatlantic cable might bring world peace, because connecting humans could only lead to better understanding and empathy. That wasn’t the outcome, and recent utopian ideas about communication (Facebook might bring us together and make us all friends!) have also met with a darker reality (Facebook might polarize us and spread false information!). Should we be scared of technology that promises to connect the world? Guests include: Robin Dunbar, inventor of Dunbar’s Number; Nancy Baym, Microsoft researcher.   This episode is brought to you by the following advertisers: Trailblazers, a podcast series from Dell and Walter Isaacson. American Express. Don’t do business without it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Some people thought the laying of the transatlantic cable might bring world peace, because connecting humans could only lead to better understanding and empathy. That wasn’t the outcome, and recent utopian ideas about communication (Facebook might bring us together and make us all friends!) have also met with a darker reality (Facebook might polarize us and spread false information!). Should we be scared of technology that promises to connect the world? Guests include: Robin Dunbar, inventor of Dunbar’s Number; Nancy Baym, Microsoft researcher. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Dr. Nancy Baym is a communication scholar, a Principal Researcher in MSR’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, lab, and something of a cyberculture maven. She’s spent nearly three decades studying how people use communication technologies in their everyday relationships and written several books on the subject. The big take away? Communication technologies may have changed drastically over the years, but human communication itself? Not so much. Today, Dr. Baym shares her insights on a host of topics ranging from the arduous maintenance requirements of social media, to the dialectic tension between connection and privacy, to the funhouse mirror nature of emerging technologies. She also talks about her new book, Playing to the Crowd: Musicians, Audiences and the Intimate Work of Connection, which explores how the internet transformed – for better and worse – the relationship between artists and their fans.

From the earliest days of networked computing, music fans were there, shaping the technologies and cultures that emerged online. By the time musicians and industry figures realized they could use the internet to reach audiences directly, those audiences had already established their presences and social norms online, putting them in unprecedented positions of power. Even widely-hailed innovators like David Bowie, Prince, and Trent Reznor were late to the game. This talk traces the intertwined histories of music fandom and online culture, unpacking the fundamental disruption and its broader implications for interacting with audiences. Nancy Baym is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft in Cambridge, Massachusetts and a Research Affiliate in CMS/W at MIT. She earned her Ph.D. in Communication at the University of Illinois in 1994 and joined Microsoft in 2012 after 18 years as a Communication professor. She is the author of Personal Connections in the Digital Age (Polity Press), now in its second edition, Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom and Online Community (Sage Press), and co-editor of Internet Inquiry: Conversations About Method (Sage Press) with Annette Markham. Her bookPlaying to the Crowd: Musicians, Audiences, and the Intimate Work of Connection will be published in July by NYU Press. More information, most of her articles, and some of her talks are available at nancybaym.com.

The Internet has been both a blessing and a curse for musicians, allowing them to spread their work widely but also making them more susceptible to harmful, unlawful copying. Legal scholar Jessica Silbey moderates a conversation with Nancy Baym, Principal Researcher for Microsoft Research New England; Jean Cook, Co-director of the Artist Revenue Streams project; and musician-composer and activist Maria Schneider about alternative models that benefit consumers and artists alike.

Social media have transformed relationships between those who create artistic work and those who enjoy it. Culture industries such as the music recording business have been left reeling as fans have gained the ability to distribute amongst themselves and artists have gained the ability to bypass traditional gatekeepers such as labels. The dominant rhetoric has been of ‘piracy,’ yet there are other tales to tell. How does direct access to fans change what it means to be an artist? What rewards are there that weren’t before? How are relational lines between fans and friends blurred and with what consequences? What new challenges other than making a living do artists face? Nancy Baym is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research New England. She is the author of Personal Connections in the Digital Age (Polity), Internet Inquiry (co-edited with Annette Markham, Sage) and Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom and Online Community (Sage). For the last two years she has been interviewing musicians about their relationships with audiences.

Musicians are increasingly becoming their own managers, promoters, bookers, and agents. And with YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, BandCamp, and dozens of other ways of staying in touch with their audience, the concert never stops. There’s no way to put a dollar value on this engagement, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not worthwhile. How are artists building an audience, completely outside of their music, simply by opening up online? Nancy Baym — author of the recent book Personal Connections in the Digital Age, Professor of Communications at University of Kansas, and all around music aficionado — joined me this week to talk about how fans are building genuine relationships online and how artists are able to thrive because of them.

Is there room in the music industry for middle-class musicians? Friend of the show Nancy Baym brought together three career performer/songwriters who all stumbled on the same analogy for how musicians can “make it” in the digital age: that of Community Supported Agriculture (CSAs). Kristin Hersh, Zoe Keating, and Erin McKeown discuss what models have worked for them, and the unorthodox ways they’ve learned to make a living as artists.

Artists and musicians spend a lot of time communicating with their fan community, whether it be social networks, email, or just the music itself. With so much thought and energy going into fan... So what's it take to be Indie anywho? www.cdbabypodcast.com