sucrose. It is concluded that the osmoregulatory response of aphids to diets and plants are comparable, and, more generally, that the feeding and osmoregulatory capabilities of the aphids are compatible with the phloem sugar levels commonly encountered by aphids feeding on plants.
We examine two “producer-oriented” audio distribution platforms, SoundCloud and Bandcamp, which have been important repositories for the hopes of musicians, commentators, and audiences that digital technologies and cultural platforms might promote democratization of the cultural industries, and we compare their achievements and limitations in this respect. We show that the emancipatory elements enshrined in SoundCloud’s bottom-up abundance are compromised by two elements that underpin the platform: the problematic “culture of connectivity” of the social media systems to which it must remain integrally linked and the systems of intellectual property that the firm has been increasingly compelled to enforce. By contrast, it seems that Bandcamp has been relatively stable in financial terms while being at odds with some key aspects of “platformization,” and we explore the possibility that some of the platform’s apparent success may derive from how its key features makes it attractive to indie musicians and fans drawn to an independent ethos. Nevertheless, we argue that even while in some respects Bandcamp acts more effectively as a cultural alternative than does SoundCloud, Bandcamp is also congruent economically and discursively with how platforms capitalize on the activity of self-managing, self-auditing, specialist, worker-users.
Recent theoretical work by Internet and social media scholars promises to offer valuable clarity to a concept which has been historically rather muddy: the affordance. Connections and shared themes within this recent literature have been thus far rather under-developed, and therefore the first contribution of this article is to strengthen those connections. It argues for a nascent conceptualisation of affordances as ‘sites of contestation’, improving on unsatisfactory applications of affordance theory to date by focusing on the specificity of user-groups, on social media’s status as both textual and material, and on power imbalances between users and platforms. The second contribution of this article is an empirical application of this analytical tool. Drawing on ethnographic work in a do-it-yourself (‘DIY’) music scene in Leeds, it considers what is ‘afforded’ to these practitioners by the Facebook Pages platform. Three key affordances are outlined – ‘digging’, ‘rallying’ and ‘surveilling’ – which shed light on the complexity and variety of contestations enacted between platforms and users.
The emergence of social media in the early 21st century promised to facilitate new "DIY" cultural approaches, emphasizing participation and democratization. However, in recent years these platforms have been criticized as domineering and exploitative. For DIY musicians in scenes with lengthy histories of cultural resistance, is social media a powerful emancipatory and democratizing tool, or a new corporate antagonist to be resisted?
DIY Music explores the significant challenges faced by artists navigating this fraught cultural landscape. How do anti-commercial musicians operate in the competitive, attention-seeking world of social media? How do they deal with a new abundance of data and metrics? How do they present their activity as "cultural resistance"? This book shows that a platform-enabled DIY approach is now the norm for a wide array of cultural practitioners; this "DIY-as-default" landscape threatens to depoliticize the call to "do-it-yourself."
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