The Sixty-One: Listener Celebrity and the Fourth Window

Stephen Chaloner
Alex Enscoe
Max Krugman

The Sixty-One’s online mission statement reads “thesixtyone makes music discovery a fun, adventurous experience … like a massively-multiplayer game for music junkies.” In this game players compete for points. There are two kinds of players: Artists and Listeners. Artists receive points by being “bumped” by their Listeners, and Listeners receive points by logging in often, bumping songs that later grow in popularity (indicating that the Listener has good taste) and listening to little-heard songs. Both types of member gain levels by acquiring points, and higher-leveled members have more influence on the website. The site’s conception of social interaction and the artist/audience divide is particularly intriguing in light of Danah Boyd’s article “Why Youth <3>

To Boyd, “the practices that … differentiate social network sites from other types of computer-mediated communication … take place in public: Friends are publicly articulated, profiles are publicly viewed, and comments are publicly visible” (Boyd 7). The Sixty-One is not the same kind of site as, for example, Facebook—its profiles are limited, and music is more important than networking. Instead of friends, members can subscribe to each other, and be informed of each new song a favorite Artist uploads or a tasteful Listener bumps. Still, it is a social network according to Boyd’s definition. Bumping drives the site, so a look at members’ comment walls yields an interesting inversion of what occurs on, say, Myspace Music—where fans thank artists for adding them to their friend list. On The Sixty-One, it is more often Artists thanking high-ranking Listeners for bumping them. Boyd also has it that "building an intricate profile is an initiation rite" (Boyd 11), in which identities are written into being. Here the object is celebrity—to become a popular Artist, or to be an influential Listener. In a sense, bumps on The Sixty-One are publicity incarnate.

Publicity is an important topic to Keenan. For him, the public “belongs by rights to others, and to no one in particular” (Keenan 133). He illustrates the division between public and private as “the subject’s variable status … defined by its position relative to this window” (Keenan 132). Keenan speaks of three windows: the first is vertical, human-oriented, allowing passage in and out. The second is horizontal, a technological tool, meant to let light in, exposing interiors in the sense of a photograph. The third is television, existing in global time, opening onto a “false day,” occurring “beyond the perceptive horizon” (qtd in Keenan 135). Now, however, it seems that there is a fourth window: the computer equipped with internet access. Keenan asks whether television is oriented “out onto the world, presenting a view of the distant (tele-vision)? Or does it intrude into the home…? …television at once contains the world and is then recontained by the home … that can then be reintegrated into the world home-system” (Keenan 130). The connection the internet provides is insistent and reciprocal: like television, the computer contains the world, but allows each user to broadcast as well as receive. It is not recontained by the home, rather, it contains the world and the home in a new system.

Keenan refers to Foucault’s discussion of panopticism in Surveiller et Punir: “That light can also be the dark side, as it were, of the humanist interpretation of the window … The subject comes into being as a ghostly silhouette, the target and the source of peculiar gazes that function by not seeing … requiring only light as the possibility of sight” (Keenan 128-129). Illumination by the light forces us to reconceive ourselves as objects and lend ourselves to similar interpretation by others. For Keenan, the public is indeed the intrusion of otherness into the security of the self, “the interruption … of all that is radically irreducible to the order of the individual … [tearing] us from ourselves, [exposing] us to and [involving] us with others” (Keenan 133). To him this is a violent action—he mentions a case in which a Brooklyn 17-year-old was killed by a bullet that came through his window. Keenan fears this “overexposure,” and is concerned about the power of mass media like television, whose controllers can project publicity with a force against with “all conventional means are powerless” (qtd in Keenan 134). The internet complicates these issues intriguingly: The Sixty-One’s members want to become public objects, acquire as much publicity as possible, project light onto whatever they can provide of their interiority—songs, comments, or some kind of quantifiable musical taste. The panoptic model is distorted: they want to be seen, want to know when they are being seen, and because of the structure of the website can know when they are seen. It is nothing new for artists to seek celebrity, but on The Sixty-One even listening is publicized—Listeners are in a sense gaze personified, and they want their gaze to be noticed.

Keenan’s argument hinges on the idea that “The public sphere is structurally elsewhere, neither lost nor in need of recovery or rebuilding but defined by its resistance to being made present.” The internet may not be exactly the public sphere made present, but it certainly appears to be a more accessible manifestation than has been possible until now. Perhaps this is where Keenan’s warning of overexposure becomes inadequate: this public is not completely beyond our grasp, we are given the ability to affect it through our actions and through our gaze, which is made real by the internet’s ability to remember what we have looked at. Profiles on social networking sites like The Sixty-One are at most weak simulations of self—yet still somewhat controllable protrusions of the self into the mass media that lives in universal time. Thus Keenan’s fear that “In public … I am without precisely the self-possession that would otherwise constitute my freedom” becomes, to some extent, unjustified. He says “Still … the figure of the human as prisoner—secure captive of self-knowledge and of a closed interiority … is challenged, disfigured, by the blinding light of another window” (Keenan 129). Artifacts like The Sixty-One open a multiplicity of windows, and beg the question: if anything is overexposed, is anything?