Emily J Ridener

Music for the ages: vinyl versus digital

With the sale of vinyl records rising in recent years is there a threat to digital music?

Let’s go back to February 8, 2007. It was my 14^th birthday and my present changed my daily musical intake.

An iPod Nano.

I had been hauling around a portable CD player and a disc or two in the years leading up to the small and sleek black piece of technology I named Vlad. The CD player was bothersome; it skipped if you bumped it while doing homework and stalled when you tried to skip songs.

Switching over to a digital format was one of my greatest choices. Let’s skip back to 2015 with my beloved iPod Touch and the iTunes providing me with the at least 100 songs a day I play. Goodbye to 12 song CDs and hello to 2213 songs-and-counting iPod named Markus.

Which is why the latest trend in music is making me scratch my head.

Vinyl, which is temperamental and cumbersome yet cool to have, collecting is on the rise. Damaging a vinyl is as easy as pulling it out of the sleeve and they collect dust like a magnet collects metal shards. A spike in vinyl sales and a drop in digital album sales are puzzling but it offers up the question of generation, trend and statement all in one.

Perhaps we can blame this rise in vinyl sales on enthusiasm over Record Store Day and artists choosing to release special edition “RSD” albums the third Saturday in April every year since 2007. Dearborn Music, a music store offering a 20 percent off discount during Record Store Day and opens an hour earlier than normal Saturdays, had people lining up the night before as early as 8:30 p.m. to get first dibs on their vinyl wish list.

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One of the biggest draws I’ve discovered is along the lines of being the elitist approach to music collecting. It’s more impressive to say, “This is my record collection” rather than, “Here’s my iTunes Library.” Many of the vinyl albums I’ve encountered, new releases and popular used albums, are sold on Amazon.com within the range of $15-$40 versus digital albums on iTunes within the range of $7.99 to $14.99. There are the outliers of those ranges as there are with anything but the basic point remains digital copies are cheaper and go with you anywhere on your mobile devices. You won’t see many people carrying around a record player and a case holding a few vinyls on a college campus as Wayne State University student Hope Crenshaw points out, “You can’t really bring a record player to school.”

Dr. Karen McDevitt, a Wayne State University professor in communication and media theory, says there is “furniture” element to vinyl because turntables take up a significant amount of space and the vinyl needs to be stored in some form of shelving. McDevitt compared vinyl to a Pandora bracelet stating you collect vinyl like you collect charms and seek to show off you can afford to do so.

Digital formats, which include and are not limited to MP3 players, Internet radio, services such as Spotify, Soundcloud, Pandora and the classic iTunes, have paved the way for music to be ready at our fingertips. So why did Nielsen’s 2014 report show digital album sales take a -9.4 percent hit while LP/vinyl sales jumped +51.8 percent from 2013 to 2014?

In April, Nielsen released a report of billboard’s top selling vinyl records. One would think the list would be heavy with artists from before the eighties but instead only four represent a time before the 2000s.

What is not shocking is The Beatles 1969 release “Abbey Road“ occupying the top slot with 172,000 records but the number two spot goes to an album released roughly a week shy of forty years later. Mumford and Sons 2009 release “Sigh No More“ leads modern music’s vinyl sales with 110,000. The list of ten albums also includes Jack White’s “Lazaretto“ (2014), Bon Iver’s “For Emma Forever Ago” (2007), Arctic Monkey’s “AM“ (2013), Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” (1973), Bob Marley & The Walkers “Legend“ (1984), Lana Del Rey’s “Born to Die” (2012), Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue“ (1959) and the Black Keys’ “Brothers“ (2010).

One of the largest draws digital offers to consumers is the independence from the songs you don’t want to hear on each album. Why buy a vinyl copy of Jack White’s “Blunderbuss“ if you’re only interested in the track “Sixteen Saltines?” On iTunes, you can choose to buy the entire album for $10.99 when you can buy the track you’re after for $1.29 instead?

After talking with friends, family and acquaintances on the subject I’ve come to the conclusion there is no clear winner of the format battle. Calling vinyl a threat to digital is extreme but the rise is undeniable. People willing to pay for a vinyl will do so just as people seeking a convenient device or streaming service will continue to support digital.

A favorite music related quote comes from Jojo, a character in Julie Taymor’s musical Across the Universe (2007), “Music’s the only thing that makes sense anymore. Play it loud enough, it keeps the demons at bay.” No matter what side of the vinyl versus digital battle you find yourself on at the end of the day you’re still supporting the musicians and artists that create the music you are purchasing and streaming.

For record stores in the Detroit area, see map below.

Review: It’s Complicated: the social live of networked teens

danah boyd’s 2014 book on the lives teens live on social networks

danah boyd boasts a slew of titles including Principle Researcher at Microsoft, visiting professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and faculty affiliate of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society so safe to say I knew going into this book boyd didn’t wake up one day and decide to research this topic. boyd has published many papers and essays on the subject of social media and how it affects society. boyd’s title, “It’s Complicated,” is a great way to sum up her research of how teens use social media and how it effects their personal relationships with one another.

boyd keeps a casual approach to what some would consider a dry topic. Rather than getting lost in psychological terminology or behavior, boyd writes of her experience and findings in a way that will keep you in tuned to the teens she interviews and their approach to social media and the lives they live on each network. I found this as a relief seeing as anytime I have been forced to read what I would refer to as a boring academic text has been difficult and unmemorable.

Along with giving the ages of the teens interviewed, boyd gives their race and their location as a means of showing the diversity of the individuals used in her years of research. Places such as Iowa, Michigan, Boston, Los Angeles and New York are visited and the different social media mentioned shows the evolution of teens and social media use. Myspace, Twitter, LiveJournal and Facebook are among them. By distinguishing between the location, age and race of each teen, boyd gave her findings more strength and credibility because she didn’t focus on a sole group with a few outliers.

One of my favorite parts of the book could be used as an abstract and hits boyd’s point home:

“As teens struggle to make sense of different social contexts and present themselves appropriately, one thing becomes clear: the internet has not evolved into an idyllic zone in which people are free from the limitation of the embodied world. Teens are struggling to make sense of who they are and how they fit into society in an environment in which contexts are networked and collapsed, audiences are invisible, and anything they say or do can easily be taken out of context. They are grappling with battles that adults face, but they are doing do while under constant surveillance and without a firm grasp of who they are.”

Boyd’s strength is her organization of her research. Split into chapters such as privacy, bullying, addiction and inequality, each chapter gives the reader an in-depth look at how teens are effected and play a part of or create each subject.

One of the more distracting aspects of the book is the repetition. I believe boyd wrote each chapter with as much supporting evidence as she could and it gets to be redundant after so many pages of reading about a different teen with the same general conclusion. For example, in the chapter on privacy boyd starts off with a male 17-year-old from North Carolina referred to as “Waffles” about privacy and he responses, “Every teenager wants privacy. Every single last one of them, whether they tell you or not, wants privacy.” We are then moved to 17-year-old Bly Lauritano-Werner and her National Public Radio piece on her mother crossing boundaries of privacy by viewing Bly’s LiveJournal account, then we meet Alicia, Shamika, Carmen, Serena, Jenna, Mikalah, Kat and Christopher. It can be overwhelming keeping track of these teens within one chapter and their views on privacy.

“It’s Complicated” can be summed up by one of the sentences that stands out from the text, “In short, they’re [teens] navigating one heck of a cultural labyrinth.”

Social media: how journalists should present themselves

Social media has presented opportunities and drawbacks to journalism but there are some ways to stand out as a credible source to the public for news

One of the biggest concerns of any journalist should be not only how they use social media to get their content to the public but also how they present themselves to the public. Who would trust the words of a journalist with no credentials or worse yet nothing written in their about section of Twitter?

If unaffiliated with a particular organization, I would put journalist, reporter, freelancer, etc. so people know your Tweets will likely be news oriented. Also, letting people know areas of interest is a good heads-up so the public can seek you out as a good source for news on gender, politics, music, entertainment, etc. For example, my Twitter about section says (below):

I want people to know if they want sports news then I am definitely not the person to seek out for information. Also, because I am not affiliated with a news organization and am still a student, I made sure to specify that I am a journalism student at Wayne State University.

Being aloof or mysterious isn’t all that much of a draw. The more open you are with the public about the work you do the higher the chance of gaining the public’s trust. I’m not saying blast posts about what you’re doing at every second of everyday but instead be open about interests and open to dialogue with those replying to tweets or commenting on blog posts.

Because I view Instagram as a more laid back social media, my info is more laid back to match the setting. I post pictures involving anything from news, music, art, blogs or lastly some personal things to show I am human and not a robot.

Notice on both profiles I have links to one of the blogs I created. I know if I put a blog post up about the death of a popular rock star, people are going to look at Twitter and know within five minutes of it happening rather than clicking on my blog story unless they want the details. The Guardian did a story in November about how social media has effected journalism. Even though blogs are great for getting your content out to the masses, it is important to keep up with the social media machine because it’s the first source people go to in order to find answers.

Brief update from the music universe

As a lover of rock ‘n’ roll from the greater Detroit area, watching video of Jack White joining forces with Robert Pant on stage at Lollapalooza Argentina to perform “The Lemon Song” was a great moment. Plant, vocalist of Led Zeppelin, and White crossed paths when they were both slotted to play the festival. Plant said last September he would, “be happy to make a single with him.”

Just a few days after Blink 182 replaced vocalist Tom Delonge with Alkaline Trio vocalist Matt Skiba, Delonge took to his social media to clarify his plans for the year. Delonge says he will be releasing a total of four albums and 15 novels. Reports have been mixed, mostly because Delonge’s posting and taking down updates on his future.

I nearly was jumping for joy when I found out about the new Kurt Cobain documentary to be released on HBO May 4th titled Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck. The latest with the documentary is a limited theatrical release in Los Angeles, New York and Seattle in late April.

Gender, sex and sexuality in early modern literature

The first time I met Dr. Simone Chess, I was a former wannabe English major that had turned her back on the major in favor of journalism and I discovered I had had the wind taken from my literary sails. I took a high level English class on William Shakespeare’s works, as a free elective and for fun, and Chess was my instructor. She was always passionate about our readings but she was also always passionate about the roles gender, sex and sexuality play in literature, particularly the early modern period. It was often discussed in class the comedy behind but also the meaning behind cross-dressing in Shakespeare’s texts. It piqued my interest because in the past I had never been in a class where we had gone so in-depth on the topic.

An assistant professor in the English department at Wayne State University, Chess studies gender, sex and sexuality, particularly the subject of cross dressing, in the early modern period of literature. Chess, who currently has a manuscript up for review at academic presses on her research in gender and sexuality, has many favorite authors but focuses on authors such as Ben Jonson, Mary Wroth and Philip Sidney when working on her cross-dressing studies.

“I was drawn to it as an undergraduate, 16th and 17th century British literature, I think in part because I had some great undergraduate instructors who were themselves involved in what was then an emerging trend in looking at women authors and feminist issues in early modern literature,” she says. “In terms of gender and sexuality, one of the reasons we call it the early modern [period] instead of just Renaissance is that there’s this argument that people were starting to become modern during this time period and if one big part of what makes us modern is how we think about gender and sexuality, then it is important to see connections between that moment and our own.”

Chess says she believes we have returned to some ideas of the early modern period, “I think now most queer folk and young people think that sexuality is more of a spectrum, not a fixed identity that you just are gay or you just are straight. I think a lot of people would say it’s more complicated and more flexible than that. That’s actually an early modern idea.”

How does one study people or characters that are printed on a page or portrayed on a stage? There are three main approaches to what Chess studies. There’s the deep reading approach which involves “letting the text speak for itself through close interrogations” by paying attention to word choice.

“In my work from male-to-female cross dressers, one thing at the close reading level are what pronouns will the author use to talk about a character,” she says. “For example, in one of the most famous prose/cross-dressing texts there is a man-to-female cross-dresser in Philip Sidney’s (The Countess of Pembroke’s) Arcadia. At the time that that character dresses as a woman, the pronouns in the text shift and the author refers to the character by female pronouns even though the audience knows it’s a man in a dress.”

There’s also the theoretical methodology approach which involves comparing gender and sexuality theory we have now and using it to analyze early modern texts, “An example of that would be Judith Butler’s gender performativity which says we’re all performing our gender all the time whether our genders appear normative or not and you could certainly use performativity to look at early modern texts even though early moderns didn’t necessarily think gender worked that way.”

For the next approach, it can cause some raised brows. It is easy to forget all things had to be learned at some point and much of our knowledge about how the body works has been discovered within the past century or so. The historical approach revolves around understanding how people in that time period understood the sexed body, “There’s one argument that says there was a one sex model of the body at this time period. That men and women were the same but of different temperatures and with their genitals visibly looking different and that through exertion a woman’s penis could fall out because the vagina was just an inside out penis.”

It may seem cringe-worthy now but it is important to remember our knowledge of gender, sex and sexuality has evolved. Chess says, “The science will always change but the people will change differently.”

*Note: Image obtained via Google Images

The Girls’ Engineering Exploration takes over Wayne State

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The Danto Engineering Development Center was overcome on Saturday with young girls wanting to learn more about science and engineering. The eighth annual Girls’ Engineering Exploration is the Detroit Professional Section of Society of Women Engineers (SWE) The event, known as GEE, had been in the works for four months and was made possible by donations from Toyota, DTE Energy, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, Autoliv and General Motors.

Anne Dancy, vice president of outreach for SWE and part of the Chrysler Institute of Engineering, says that the GEE is held at Wayne State University because the target group is young intercity girls and “(it) makes no sense to bus them out to Auburn Hills” where the Chrysler Group LLC is based.

The free event for girls who attend Detroit Public Schools grades 4^th-6^th featured activities such as a fashion show geared toward learning about proper safety gear while working in the field, making lip balm and creating cell towers out of pasta and marshmallows. All girls left with a backpack full of school supplies and different science experiment ideas.

With 136 girls were registered for the event, Dancy says 86 of those registered were checked in but many trickled in throughout the day. This was clear in the crowded auditorium during the fashion show as students finished lunch while DTE Energy volunteers demonstrated the do’s and donut’s of proper safety attire.

The GEE proved to be a fun and hands-on approach to teach young girls about safety, science and engineering.

Website and article critique

British Broadcasting Corporation, widely known as the BBC, began in 1922. With daily broadcasts in Marconi’s London studio, BBC grew to become of the world’s most recognized news outlets. The BBC is an independent organization funded by license fees. Operating as an autonomous corporation under Royal Charter, the BBC does not have a president but an Executive Board which is chaired by Director-General Mark Thompson.

When visiting the BBC homepage is a dull experience. You’re faced with a white background and a bunch of sections that look cluttered with stories. Some of the section heads are different sizes but it the sizes do not get smaller as you scroll, instead they start large, get smaller then get large again. The section headers also seem to follow a pattern for the coloring of the titles. The larger titles have different colors while the smaller titles are all red. The menu at the top of the page gives you the separate section with a quick click but is stationary as you scroll down. If you’re ready to spend a Tweet or share a post to Facebook from the site you’ll have to click a specific story because nowhere on the homepage does the social media appear.

One of the fun features of the website is the sections on the right hand side of the page which has sections with clever names. If interested in cars you can click on “Autophiles” and if you want the latest in the art world you can click on “State of the Art.” Because the BBC has such a far reach, at the bottom of the page is a gray box with 27 different languages available at the click of a button. If you don’t have time to scroll and want to know what’s trending, the right hand side features a box with the most Shared, Read and Watch/Listened stories on the website.

When I clicked on the article I wanted to critique, I was brought to BBC News which looked a bit more lively than the BBC homepage. The top of the page had the different sections in line at the top and they were all a dark red to stand out against the red of the header.

The article on the Ukrainian crisis begins with a video, which sets the tone for the article, about the most recent developments in the conflict between the Ukrainian government and rebel forces. One of the first things I noticed was the sharing options at the top of the story for either Facebook or Twitter which are also found at the bottom of the story as well.

There is only one external link in the text which leads you to a press release from the Ukrainian president’s official website otherwise all links are outside the article and leads you to other stories related to the Ukrainian crisis. The map of areas discussed in the article features color coded zones for the Ukrainian troop buffer zone, Ukrainian troop withdrawal line and date, Separatist buffer zone and the Separatist withdrawal line along with the date.

There is an analysis that could have been put into some of the dead space on the right side because it throws you off as you’re reading the article. Thin gray lines at the top and bottom of the text separate it from the article and I feel it would have been better if it were a gray box instead. I had to take a moment to question whether it was part of the article or separate.

One of the most useful parts of the article was toward the bottom of the page called “More on This Story.” This section offered video links, related stories, stories focusing on the background of the conflict as well as links to other news sites regarding the same story. A very helpful part of the external sites is a star which indicates if a registration or subscription may be needed for that site in order to read the story.

I feel the BBC homepage is boring until one of the sections is chosen. There is no links to the BBC’s social media sites and the stories seen cluttered and slightly unorganized. The site is friendly to non-English speaking individuals and those looking for a specific set of news i.e. sports, entertainment or world news.