Pubblici della musica online: Il ruolo della memetica nelle culture partecipative dei social media

This thesis is driven by the need to investigate the contemporary forms of online music audience, the relationship with digital media and the forms of media productivity put into circulation. The evolution of media audience practices can be examined through a diachronic path of socio-technological evolution with different levels of consumption and production: from oppositional decoding that gives spectatoriality a discursive sense of subcultural class resistance (Stuart Hall 1980) to polysemic mechanisms of intertextuality and producerly texts based on audience interpretation gaps (Fiske 1987); from the practices of textual poaching introduced by participatory fandom (Jenkins 1992) up to the pluralization of the audience and the performativity of media skills (Abercrombie, Longhurst 1998). The emergence of the network society (Castells 2010), and of platforms for online socialization (boyd 2008, 2010, 2014) have profoundly changed the sense of the audience position within the communication processes (Boccia Artieri 2012), whose productivity becomes central to the encounter between institutional processes and bottom-up participation models, creating the culture of convergence (Jenkins 2007), whose structure defines the model for the technological and social ecosystem in which the contemporary experience of circulation stands out of media content. Within this context, music is probably the first cultural product that has radically intertwined its status with digital technologies and the web. The evolution of the mechanisms for listening and sharing musical material is the result of processes of remediation from below and reintermediation from above (Sibilla 2008; Wikstrom 2009) which have led to the profound redefinition of the careers of artists and the role of the public within of an interconnected media landscape (Baym 2018). The current context of online music consumption is defined in particular by the ecosystem of interdependent platforms (Van Dijck, Poell, De Waal 2018), by the dating of personalized streaming through algorithmic curation (Bonini, Gandini 2019; Morris 2015) and by circulation of musical material by users within social media. In the interweaving of experience and technological affordances (boyd 2010) these spaces are privileged places to experiment with one's media skills to get in touch with an artist (Beer 2008; Marwick, boyd 2011) for sharing one's passion for a musical genre ( Baym 2007) or for the construction of an identity online through musical contents that can be used thanks to interoperability mechanisms. However, musical sociality can in some way be redefined by the emergence within these spaces of highly connective practices and cultures such as that of the online meme (Shifman 2014) previously relegated to niche spaces on the web. The production and circulation of these contents continually redefines the sense of communication due to parodic intertextual short circuits that can only be understood through the mastery of certain cultural codes (Milner 2016). This is the case that defined the object of our research, namely the emergence of particular publics of music whose productivity is defined by memetic practice. We therefore asked ourselves what was the role of online memes within the musical productivity of audiences, trying to understand, through a digital ethnography of social media (Hine 2015; Pink, Postill 2012), on the one hand which media and social practices define the relationship between publics and memetics, on the other hand what impact these vernacular cultures can have on the public imaginary.