Tag: English-language pop music

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