CHI2005: How Groups of People use iTunes to listen to Music and manage their Work Identities

"Listening In: Practices Surrounding iTunes Music Sharing" by Amy Voida, Rebecca E. Grinter, Nicolas Ducheneaut, W. Keith Edwards and Mark W. Newman was a high spot at CHI2005, offering a very different perspective on music 'sharing' from the slightly hysterical discussions of piracy and how to control copying that are dominating the field.

Their paper dealt with the social practices surrounding the iTunes music sharing of 13 people in one organisational setting, based on accounts from the participants. As well as examining adoption, critical mass, and privacy; they tackle the more particular issues of impression management and access control; the musical impressions of others that are created as a result of music sharing; the ways in which participants attempted to make sense of the dynamic system; and implications of the overlaid technical, musical, and corporate topologies. From this analysis, they pull out design implications that go well beyond those analysis of use that centre round the individual user.

'The ability to see and subsequently judge others’ playlists arose when Apple released a version of iTunes that supported the sharing of music collections on the same subnetwork via the Rendezvous (also known as OpenTalk or ZeroConf2) discovery protocol. Suddenly, individuals could listen to and examine not just their own music collection but those of anyone on the same subnetwork,' they point out.

Asking a plethora of questions, including: 'Are iTunes users really casting musical judgments upon other iTunes users?' 'In what ways does the design of iTunes impact how the impressions of others are being constructed? What additional kinds of work are created to ensure that the impressions others are constructing are desirable ones?' and 'How do users make sense of the comings and goings of users and their music libraries?', the paper goes on to answer many of them for the first time.

For instance: 'Several of our participants reported problems with their workplace iTunes music libraries resulting from additionally using iTunes at home. One participant (P1) had music in his library that he had downloaded at work only to take home for his wife. Another participant (P2) had to construct a completely separate music library for work because his music library at home contained so much of his son’s music. The overloading of multiple identities in a single library raises other design questions and suggests that providing some mechanism for sharing based on "which user you are" would be of value.

'More generally, the length to which people managed their shared music highlights the relationship between identity and access control. Today, many access control solutions are designed by security engineers with secure systems in mind. But this study suggests that access control is more complex than simply restricting who can see what. Access control is a tool through which users manage others’ impressions of them. It is a technology that has been appropriated to support the careful crafting of identity.'

There is no way to do justice to the richness of the findings in this 10 page paper here. If this is of interest, beg, borrow or 'share' a copy...

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