Situations in which New Media and elements of urban culture converge give rise to thought-provoking questions about early adoption, influence, culture, insider vs outsider perception of culture, and the standards of technological literacy that we seek to maintain as a society.
Does early adoption have different characteristics depending on the community that is doing the buying? In a time where major platforms like iTunes, Boost, and Verizon owe much to the musicality of their commercials, who is influencing whom?
When artists mention technologies in their music voluntarily, as opposed to at the request of a company, how important should this decision be when compared to commercial use in a historical context? Or, perhaps it all of these uses are commercial because all involve the sale of a product.
If one assumes that all music isn’t necessarily commercial, and a commercial features a certain kind of music in order to try to appeal to an urban market, how authentic can the commercial be (a perennial question)? And what about the users? If particular technologies are widely known and used in mainstream culture, how should this use have any bearing in discussions of issues such as the Digital Divide?
The following list is a brief collection of intersections between urban culture and communications technology, which is not intended to serve as a means of answering these questions, but to highlight them and point towards others........
Search Engines
Five or six years ago, if someone mentioned a search engine in a song, people might look quizzical; no longer. This year, pop culture phenom / Hip Hop recording artist (depending on your opinion) Soulja Boy’s Twitter profile consists of two words: ‘Google me.’ , a request which may have been inspired by Pharrell Williams protégé Teyana Taylor’s song of the same title. Later that year, a group of comedy video makers called the Pantless Knights held search engine rap battles in full costume.
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