Thinking inside the box: In search of music -video culture

The core of this dissertation is formed by ethnography I conducted with teenagers in the eastern United States to examine the development of music-video cultures and to discuss the medium\u27s overwhelming influence on the adolescent imagination. Out of the materials and experiences from this ethnography, I generate a working definition of music-video culture and cultural practice and I explore the dynamics of ethnography in media cultures and the ways in which it challenges ethnomusicologists to think differently about participant-observation, fieldnotes, and other traditional anthropological methods. Additionally, I develop a model for the analysis of individual music-video texts, building upon recent scholarly contributions to media and music theory as well as integrating participants\u27 understanding of salient audio-visual parameters. Throughout the project, I examine the ways in which music-video texts and programming shape and determine ways of living and being for teenage participants, at the same time that I discuss audio-viewing as both active and purposeful. I argue that teens exhibit a powerful imaginative engagement with music-video texts and that we may look to the relatively secure realm of the imagination as the site of their engagement. I further suggest that music video constructs different and conflicting senses of duration (the passing of time), history (time past), and experience (the present). Through the implication of a collective memory, in particular, music-video programming orders audio-viewers\u27 sense of history, and effectively disciplines music-video cultural participants as such. Finally, I examine the ways in which music-video representations of the body influence and affect female teenage audio-viewers. Specifically, I examine the affects of music video\u27s relentless representation of unrealistic body images and the mechanisms by which these representations naturalize ambivalence and self-harm