The architectures and norms of new media push people toward sharing everyday intimacies they might historically have kept to close friends and family. As more people are pushed toward gig work, the original gig workers - musicians - provide an exemplary lens for exploring the implications of this widespread blurring of interpersonal communication into everyday practices of professional viability.
Nancy Baym is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft in New England and Research Affiliate in Comparative Media Studies and Writing at MIT. She began researching online fan community at the start of the 1990s, when she often had to explain the concept that networked computers were used to communicate. She’s written on how people make sense of new communication technologies and weave them into their everyday lives in her books Personal Connections in the Digital Age (Polity), now in its second edition, Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom, and Online Community (Sage), and, Internet Inquiry: Conversations about Method (co-edited with Annette Markham, Sage). She’s appeared in the New York Times, the BBC, NPR, WIRED, Mother Jones, and other news outlets. A lifelong music fan and former independent-record store employee, her new book Playing to the Crowd: Musicians, Audiences, and the Intimate Work of Connection (NYU) draws on years of ethnographic participation and interviews with dozens of artists to show how social media have – and have not – changed the relationships between musicians and audiences and what that portends for workers in other fields.