Theorizing and documenting cultural insularity in the center: A critical analysis of U.S. college students’ English-language Spotify consumption orientations

In a forthcoming paper, which will be published in the Journal of Communication Inquiry, I seek to define and illustrate the explanatory power of a proposed theory of cultural insularity in the center. I do so via an instructive case study that critically interrogates the self-reflection of American college undergraduates vis-à-vis their largely Anglo-American and English-language centric pop music orientations – with Anglo-American here defined as including the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Cultural insularity in the center — which I will refer to from here on as CIC — describes a tendency among American cultural consumers, especially those who hail from dominant and also mostly English-monolingual groups, to consume Anglo-American cultural products over “other” cultural products, sometimes to the apparent near exclusion of non-Anglo-American cultural products. This tendency, I suggest, is particularly apparent in terms of “language-heavy” objects such as popular music. In this paper, I examine and critically engage CIC via a textual analysis of the written discourse of 86 American undergraduates. These undergraduates were required to — via a formal written and verbal group assignment – directly reflect upon their own English-language heavy online pop music consumption habits when using the global music distribution platform Spotify.

Broadly speaking, according to the CIC model I propose, American cultural consumers are more likely than consumers in any other national context to exhibit the greatest levels of cultural self-orientation, especially toward language intensive cultural products. CIC focuses on the unique cultural situation of Americans, especially that of Americans who are essentially monolingual in English. It also seeks to theorize beyond the U.S. to consumers situated in national contexts farther from the center whose cultural consumption patterns often tend to orient more toward the center than toward products produced in, and coming from, less culturally and less linguistically central countries, for example, from China or Russia.

The primary impetus behind the CIC model – and this paper – is the belief that not enough emphasis is being placed on the unique situation of American consumers vis-à-vis a global cultural and linguistic configuration of power often dominated by Anglo-American cultural products (Kuisel, 2003; Ritzer & Stilman, 2003) and Anglo-American English (Crystal, 2001; Phillipson, 2008). Indeed, as Cleveland et. al (2016) have noted, a clear inward pointing cultural consumption orientation among large numbers of Americans has remained mostly under-explored and under-interrogated among social scientific researchers.

Data for this paper were generated via a group assignment administered four times in four separate iterations of an undergraduate international communication course held in Fall 2015, Winter 2017, Fall 2017 and Fall 2018 at a mid-sized university in the Western U.S. Collectively, there were 86 students across the four international communication classes and 24 groupings of three to four students across the four classes. Two-thirds of the 86 students were female and one third were male. Eighty-eight percent of the students were white and 12% were from minorities with most of these minorities consisting of foreign students, primarily from China. The Spotify Assignment required that, in groups of three to four, students generate publicly available Spotify playlists of pop music songs sung in languages other than English. Spotify, which began as a small Swedish start-up launched by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon in 2008, is the world’s top distributor of digital streaming music, accounting for 36% of the world’s streaming music consumption. As of June 2019, Spotify was available in 79 countries and it had 100 million paid subscribers and 217 million users globally.

For the Spotify assignment, students were assigned to one of six different regional groupings – Africa, Asia, Australia/New Zealand, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. These regional groupings served as geographic and cultural and linguistic containers according to which students were asked to locate, research, and organize songs sung in languages other than English. The Spotify Assignment asked students to respond as a group to a set of nine written and open-ended questions. These questions required that they reflect on their own music consumption habits as these related to language. In addition to composing and writing down group answers, students were required to put together an informal 20-minute in-class presentation in which they discussed their answers to the questions on the assignment sheet and brought into class, and played for the class, some examples of non-English language songs they found on Spotify.

Method
The primary methodological framework I use for analyzing student written answers is critical textual analysis. Here, I draw from the traditions of critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1995; Fowler, 1991; de Cillia et al., 1999) and textual analysis (Hall, 1975). Leaning in particular on Fairclough (1995), in my textual analysis below, I seek to ferret out “common-sense assumptions and presuppositions” (46) embedded in discourse, describe and organize these assumptions in a systematic way, and relate these to the larger macro-sociological context(s) in which they are located.

Empirical findings
On a broad level, student replies reflected a clear cultural and linguistic insularity. Student responses also reflected a relatively sophisticated, reflexive and frequently self-critical view of their mostly English-language heavy pop music consumption patterns. Overall, the Spotify Assignment – as it was designed to do – inspired considerable critical reflection on the part of American college students vis-à-vis the ways in which the global hegemony of English influences, and is influenced by, their own pop music consumption habits. Specific findings also underscored the utility of a concept of CIC in terms of describing, and analyzing, the unique cultural and linguistic – and also clearly hegemonic and inward/self oriented – situation of Americans vis-à-vis the global cultural system, especially with respect to language-heavy cultural products such as popular music.

Trend No. 1: Most students had not regularly listened to non-English language pop music prior to working on the Spotify Assignment.

Trend No. 2: Most students did not know much, if anything, about popular music sung in languages other than English.

Trend No. 3: Many students felt a strong ‘need’ to understand song lyrics.

Trend No. 4: Spanish was the next most ‘popular’ lyrics language after English.

Trend No. 5: Many students said the Spotify Assignment — which required them to create playlists of pop songs they liked in languages OTHER than English — was not likely to change their pop music consumption patterns/habits.

Trend No. 6. Spotify does NOT allow users to search for and easily group music according to language. This lack of a language search function on Spotify did not bother most students.

Trend No. 7. Students were very aware of the ways in which having one’s culture and language dominate globally reinforces cultural and linguistic insularity – and circularity – for them in a comparatively unique way. 

Conclusion
CIC helps us to explain and better understand, the pop music consumption habits of students in four separate sections of an international communication whose consumption patterns reflected a decidedly insular orientation toward Anglo-American pop music sung in English. Most students listened only to English-language music and knew little to nothing about pop music sung in languages other than English. Additionally, despite considerable critical reflectiveness on their part toward their own insularity, most declared that they would continue to listen only to pop music sung in English. Globally, only largely English monolingual Anglo-American consumers are likely to listen to popular music sung solely in their “own” language.

Overall, a CIC model helps us to see patterns of American consumers in a more specific way. It allows us, as well, to see, explain, and, equally important, begin to critically interrogate the ways in which language, and, more specifically, the hegemony of English, factors in to the global cultural system. In addition, CIC draws critical attention to the self-reproducing nature of the global hegemony of English in the American context — and beyond. From a critical perspective, CIC allows us to interrogate cultural inequalities vis-à-vis the global cultural system, with a special critical eye toward the privileged position of American cultural consumers in terms of the system. It also allows us to — as it did in the four international communication courses which included the 88 American college students whose discourse I analyzed in this paper — to work more clearly, and specifically, toward a critical pedagogy that problematizes privilege in the cultural and linguistic global center. Indeed, the Spotify Assignment — designed to get students to reflect on their own cultural and linguistic insularity — raised important critical awareness among students about their own linguistic blinders which tend to “blind” them toward pop music sung in other languages.

Due to copyright reasons, I cannot publish the full paper on InsularAmerica.Com. However, an abstract will soon be available  via the Journal of Communication Inquiry. And will also be able to find the full paper on JCI — if you have access to it.

References

Cleveland, M., Rojas-Méndez, J.I., Laroche, M. and Papadopoulos, N. (2016). Identity, culture, dispositions and behavior: A cross-national examination of globalization and culture change. Journal of Business Research, 69(3), 1090-1102.

Crystal, D. (2001). The future of Englishes. In: Burns A and Coffin C (eds.) Analyzing English in a global context, 53-64.

De Cilli, R., Reisigl, M. and Wodak, R. (1999). The discursive construction of national identities. Discourse & society, 10(2), 149-173.

Fairclough, N. (1995). Media discourse. E. Arnold.

Fowler, R. (1991). Discourse and Ideology in the Press. Routledge.

Hall, S. (1975). Paper Voices: The Popular Press and Social Change, 1935-1965. Rowman and Littlefield.

Kuisel, R. (2003). Debating Americanization: The Case of France. In: Beck U, Sznaider N and Winter (eds.) Global America? The Cultural Consequences of Globalization, 95-113.

Phillipson, R. (2008). Lingua franca or lingua frankensteinia? English in European integration and globalisation 1. World Englishes, 27(2), 250-267.

Ritzer, G. and Stillman, T. (2003). Assessing McDonaldization, Americanization and globalization. In: Beck U, Sznaider N and Winter (eds.) Global America? The Cultural Consequences of Globalization, 30-48.