Why do electro dancers also dance on YouTube? The media logic of the cultural practices in the electro dance youth style. Issue 4 (2nd October 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: González, Antonio Cambra
• Is Part Of: Communication review. Volume 21:Issue 4(2018)
• Page Start: 277
• Page End: 295
• Publication Date: 2018-10-02
• Subjects: habitus -- interface -- media logic -- mediatization -- urban dance -- youth style -- YouTube; Communication -- Periodicals; 302.2
• DOI: 10.1080/10714421.2018.1535727
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1071-4421

Abstract

ABSTRACT: The notion of media logic is one of relevance in the recent debates around mediatization theories. Fundamentally applied to macrolevel, institution-focused analysis, this notion has not often been applied to narrower domains of cultural practice nor used as a conceptual point of departure in this regard. This article puts forward a three-pronged analytical scheme for the discussion of the media logic underlying the cultural production of electro dance, a dance-based, urban youth style born in Paris and spread globally over the past decade under the influence of digital media. Ethnographic attention is paid to a group of electro dancers and their YouTube-based practices to empirically understand how the cultural and social dimensions of the youth group life are crucially shaped by emerging communication forms that respond to a specific (media) logic. The article concludes by suggesting the transferability of the proposed conceptual scheme to better understand other microlevel, group-related mediatized phenomena.