Music in Everyday Life III

Tomorrow's Music in Everyday Life brings together a couple of tangentially related topics:
  • American Idol
  • The American Dream
  • Professional vs. Amateur, Expert vs. Novice
  • The valorization of the amateur in the age of the Internet
I have the students reading an essay by Katherine Meizel on Idol and the celebration of failure: the article focuses on the unlikely success of William Hung.


We're also going to talk about Keith:


I hope to frame our discussion in terms of amateur/professional and novice/expert (i.e., "My friends all say I'm a good singer" vs. Simon Cowell, "You're the worst singer in the world")

I also asked them to read from Andrew Keen's book, The Cult of the Amateur. Keen's argument is basically that the access afforded by the internet has given rise to a lot of mediocrity in terms of content: gone are the experts, the gatekeepers. He laments the closing of Tower Records, the economic impact of sites like Pandora, the rise of citizen-journalists (bloggers... hey, wait...), and so on. We're going to talk about this in terms of the 10,000 hour rule (Ericsson 1996).

(In all honesty, I don't have the class fleshed out yet, which is why I'm blogging....) 

Music in Everyday Life III, part 2

Music in Everyday Life II