{"id":4421,"date":"2020-10-22T21:44:44","date_gmt":"2020-10-23T01:44:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/?p=4421"},"modified":"2020-10-22T21:44:44","modified_gmt":"2020-10-23T01:44:44","slug":"why-do-we-love-concerts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/why-do-we-love-concerts\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Do We Love Concerts?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This week, I was truly impacted by Professor Himpele\u2019s use of the Beatle\u2019s vinyl records as an analogy to \u201cdrop the bottom out of the idea of authenticity\u201d and our short conversation surrounding the blurring boundaries between reality and representation. As Professor Himpele explained in class, mp3 recordings are endless layers of representation, which points to the inexistence of a \u201ctrue\u201d, \u201cauthentic\u201d reality. For me, that brief moment represented the culmination of weeks of reading and discussion, making it one of the most salient points of this course to date. I found that this discovery challenged my understanding of authenticity as a standard for a message\u2019s successful communication, a conceptualization that I had been relying on since I was a child. When I was in the 5th grade, my favorite band was the Beatles, and for Christmas I asked my parents for a digital copy of the Magical Mystery Tour on iTunes. Almost insulted by the notion, they insisted that I listen to a more \u201cauthentic\u201d medium to capture the true essence of the artist\u2019s message. They eagerly gifted me with an entire collection of the Beatles\u2019 work <em>on cassette<\/em>. While I sincerely appreciated the gesture, we didn\u2019t own a tape player, so I never got a chance to listen to them. That said, it impressed upon me a lingering respect for the material world rooted in this conception of authenticity\u2019s superiority, which I\u2019ve carried for years\u2026. or at least until Tuesday\u2019s class. After Professor Himpele demarcated the seams of authenticity and exposed it as a bottomless pit, I\u2019ve had to wrestle with and dismantle this unwitting and ultimately irrational commitment to nostalgia. I\u2019ve had to come to terms with the fact that the original is <em>not <\/em>always better. With the very idea of originality called into question, why even consider as a factor when forming an opinion? The mp3 technology\u2019s capacity to provoke these sort of insights and questions is exactly why mp3s, and the Napster era it emerged from, were met with such fear and anxiety by members of the copyright community. In light of this revelation, the notion of ownership seems irrelevant: after all, with this underlying conceptualization of authenticity stripped away, it doesn\u2019t matter who was first, only who was better. As a digital native raised by the Internet, I find it easy to accept this, as I\u2019ve already been indoctrinated by digital realms where intellectual property protection is practically non-existent. That said, I think there\u2019s something to be said for the visceral connection one feels while listening to live music. If the goal of music, and transitively of media in general, is simply to communicate the artist\u2019s message in a way that it evokes its intended emotional response, then mp3s succeed. However, on some level, I still believe that there must be representations that are closer to the essence of original message than others, although I am no longer convinced that it matters. What do you guys think? Is our love of concerts rooted in the \u201cauthenticity\u201d of the message or the social context they provide? I am looking forward to dissecting this issue more in class!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This week, I was truly impacted by Professor Himpele\u2019s use of the Beatle\u2019s vinyl records as an analogy to \u201cdrop the bottom out of the idea of authenticity\u201d and our short conversation surrounding the blurring boundaries between reality and representation. As Professor Himpele explained in class, mp3 recordings are endless layers of representation, which points [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2772,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-post-production"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2772"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4421"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4421\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4422,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4421\/revisions\/4422"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}