ABSTRACT

Small objects of digital culture – from app and browser games to uploaded videos on sites such as YouTube, Vimeo, and Daily Motion, to smartphone apps and much more – occupy massive swathes of our time. Actually, this is frequently how we think and talk about them: the hubbub around people’s addiction to the game Flappy Bird may have been an easy target for humour, but it exemplifies exactly this issue. In this provocation, I consider web series in particular, by which I mean a planned series of videos with some kind of narrative arc (I shall discuss this further below). My questions are these: why and how do they take up so much of our time? What role or roles might music and sound contribute to them? How are they changing what we know about how music is used in narrative audiovisual contexts? In particular, I focus on series made primarily or significantly by African American women, a group that (Shonda Rhimes notwithstanding) has not had much access to producing mainstream culture, perhaps most notably films and television. 1 Because web series do not require massive capital investment or distribution networks, they are more accessible to women and non-white producers than most other forms of audiovisual culture.