Abstract
This chapter focuses on how people in their everyday practice make sense of themselves and the society that they live in using an array of resources that include, but are not confined to, digital media. The advent of digital media has changed the forms of interaction available to us and the extent to which other people’s intimate thoughts and activities are visible to us on an everyday basis. People’s consumption practices, their fitness levels, their musical tastes and response to media events are constantly displayed for us to measure ourselves against. In its focus on everyday processes of self-calibration this paper will explore lived dimensions of datafication and mediatization and seeks to consider how far these processes are indeed offering new resources for understanding who we are, with particular reference to practices of music consumption. The chapter focuses on the Philip Glass opera Akhnaten as a case study, exploring the online resources that have emerged around this work and in particular focusing on the extent to which audience responses to the work become visible online. The chapter explores the extent to which online audiences are telling one another how to interpret the work and considers the potential outcomes in terms of tendencies for audience homogeneity and audience fragmentation. The online landscape of music consumption emerges as a complex array of intertwined resources in which conventional forms of expertise remain very prominent but alternative voices from ordinary audience members are also widely available. These ordinary audience voices take having experienced a production as conferring sufficient authority to comment on its qualities, but also stress the importance of context of listening and having the suitable personal qualities to appreciate the music. Streaming services, search algorithms and YouTube recommendations play a part in informing audience preferences but take their position alongside and entwined with ordinary user voices and privileged professional expertise in providing guidance on how to consume music.