Two articles that problematize the cultural values attached to the modernist producer/consumer dichotomy, especially with regard to musical amateurism.

From Antoine Hennion (whose work is all too rarely available in English), Music industry and music lovers, beyond Benjamin: The return of the amateur:

[…] the amateur could easily be reinstated at the centre of the world of music. Far from being the slightly ridiculous provincial cousin who insists on blowing his tuba, he is every bit as modern as the musical environment dominated by professionals, techniques and market forces. It should be recognized that he too has changed, and needs to be defined as a user of music, to understand that, on the contrary, neither the professional environment, nor techniques, nor market forces have any sense without him. Thus, not only is there nothing anachronistic about the amateur, but we perceive that he has become, for the first time in history, the sole target of a musical environment completely reconstructed around him. It is not the professional who is a modern, modified variation of the authentic musical practices of our ancestors, it is the amateur.

From history of new media guru Lisa Gitelman, How Users Define New Media: A History of the Amusement Phonograph:

The production/consumption dichotomy harbors a particular determinism: within it lurks a tendency to use technology as a sufficient explanation of social and cultural change. It puts production first and has helped orient the history of technology away from the experience of any but white, middle-class men; rendering a history, according to one observer, in which “inventing the telephone is manly; talking on it is womanly.” An unreflected reliance on the same dichotomy has led to a history of the phonograph that [focuses on individual inventors, policy and pricing].

[…]

Besides the elision of consumption and buying (phonographs and records are played, after all), [most] accounts [of the history of the phonograph] limit the definition of production to the activities of inventors and entrepreneurs. What if that kind of production were only a tiny part of the story, granted its singular importance by the same cultural norms and expectations that construe technology as a male realm? The very meaning of technology might be at stake. The spring motor phonograph “worked” in homes around the world, but would it have been described as “working,” if it did not already make sense somehow within the social contexts of its innovation?

Gitelman’s argument is complex, encompassing shifts in the uses and cultural meaning of the gramophone as well as the familiar institutional and economic shifts more frequently represented as the ‘real’ history of technologies. Most importantly, she focuses particularly on the feminised space (i.e. the home) in which these shifts took place.

And in the conclusion is a broader argument that to my mind is stand-up-and-cheer material:

Casting mass culture as a shift from a tactile, craft-oriented world to a visual, mass-production one […] seems simplistic at best. Our readings of cultural history must also include the squeaks and noises of change. We must be prepared to explain the intensity of modern cultural experiences as well as their extensive range and appeal.

I love “the squeaks and noises of change” bit.