Interview Synthesis, Part I

In this round of research, I explored some of the areas I’d learned about in my survey in more depth. I conducted some interviews with individuals I’d consider festival experts of sorts, meaning people who have been to many music festivals, are enthusiastic, active music festival attendees, have been attending music festivals for many years, or who are already engaged in producing or supporting music festival experiences and services.

By exploring certain areas that I learned about from my survey in a more focused way, I’ve developed a better understanding of some of the intricacies of music festival experience – notably, from the point of view of people who fundamentally understand and seek out these events.

On sharing music festival experiences

 One area that I focused on was what people do after a music festival, and the sharing of music festival experiences. Interestingly, there is a high desire to share music festival experiences for personal reasons, and also high motivation for seeking media and content related to a music festival experience. That is – people want to share their own experiences, photos, and media, but they also are highly interested in other people’s sharing.

Many groups are attempting to unify the space around a festival by collecting images, fan-sourced media, posting to Facebook pages and groups, and blogging about festivals. Hashtagged photos and video snippets on apps like Vine readily come to mind – but the space is still open for innovation. The high desire to share about music festival experiences in my survey indicated this as well.

I looked at why people share, the meaning of sharing a music festival experience with others and the possible benefits and drawbacks of sharing. A crucial distinction that emerged was between the need to share experiences for personal versus socially-motivated sharing. Sharing content of any kind will have different motivations. Sharing content to your personal social networks, for instance, is about sharing meaningful experiences. It is a personal experience, one about reflection and the inclusion of others.

Sharing content to wider networks or more public (online) places would be about educating others, attempts at making the festival experience vivid for people who weren’t there – whether to share why people were excited about it, or simply to explain why it mattered so much to the individual doing the sharing. Any attempt to share the ‘feeling’ of being there, or the meaning of having been there seems worthy, though most people agreed most sharing does next to nothing to approximate the actual music festival experience. Simply put, words and pictures, and even video clips rarely capture the true nature of a music festival. One person mentioned how even professional videos of music festivals are ‘totally clinical’ and fail to capture much.

Interestingly, nearly everyone I spoke with is inherently interested in hearing about other people’s music festival experiences – whether or not they were also at the specific festival. There seems to be a common understanding of why these experiences are important, and an eagerness to share them, and a happy openness to hearing them from other people (I at least feel this way…). I think it indicates a deep understanding between people of sorts – even if the music festival experiences are not the same, they provide instant sympathy and intensely common ground.

There is a desire to ‘see the festival’ through other people’s eyes – as everyone’s music festival experience is deeply personal and unique, but naturally, they are centered around the same basic activities and musical performances.

In summary, sharing music festival experiences is about two things:

Personal satisfaction: about you making meaning, expressing feeling, love, enjoyment
Social sharing: sharing for other people: knowledge, for fun, common understanding

 Other areas I explored, which I’ll attempt to write up later, were:  

Music festival strategy and expertise – that is, the information and knowledge you need to make the most of each specific festival, as is one is unique and presents unique challenges and opportunities – in addition to your own personal knowledge about how to manage your own music festival experiences (especially when camping, or surviving a multiple-day event, for instance)  

The wisdom and knowledge of the crowd or the masses - self-policing, learning how to operate ‘together’ in a space, and function as a crowd (there is a nuanced understanding of things like moving in lines, not cramming in to locations, avoiding bottlenecks, and simply logistics and spatial issues negotiated by crowds)

The unique experience of music at a festival, and also live streaming – we like live streams, for the most part, for different reasons. I will explain more later.

Satisfying and growing yourself as an individual (at music festivals over time) – and how knowledge accrues at festivals

Your closer/small friend group vs. the larger festival social experience

Behind the scenes view of logistics building the Life is Beautiful Festival

I am currently looking for reviews of LIB, as it was both a first-time event and also a new sort of experiment in making a music festival happen within city streets and infrastructure. This video provides a bit of a taste of just how much work goes in to producing events of this scale.

Life is Beautiful - "Final Countdown" from Downtown Films on Vimeo

Take the opportunity to re-wire your brain to see the good in the world...at a music festival.

"The simple idea is that we we all want to have good things inside ourselves: happiness, resilience, love, confidence, and so forth. The question is, how do we actually grow those, in terms of the brain? It’s really important to have positive experiences of these things that we want to grow, and then really help them sink in, because if we don’t help them sink in, they don’t become neural structure very effectively."

"The problem is that the brain is very good at building brain structure from negative experiences. We learn immediately from pain—you know, “once burned, twice shy.” Unfortunately, the brain is relatively poor at turning positive experiences into emotional learning neural structure."

"In terms of our need for satisfaction, of experiences of gratitude, gladness, accomplishment, feeling successful, feeling that there’s a fullness in your life rather than an emptiness or a scarcity. As people increasingly install those traits, they’re going to be more able to deal with issues such as loss, or being thwarted, or being disappointed."

"On the one hand, due to modernity, many people report that moment to moment, they’re having fairly positive experiences, they’re not being chased by lions, they’re not in a war zone, they’re not in agonizing pain, they have decent medical care. And yet on the other hand, many people today would report that they have a fundamental sense of feeling stressed and pressured and disconnected from other people, longing for closeness that they don’t have, frustrated, driven, etc. Why is that? I think one reason is that we’re simply wasting the positive experiences that we’re having, in part due to modernity, because we’re not taking into account that design bug in the Stone Age brain that it doesn’t learn very well.

For me, by repeatedly taking in the good to grow inner strength, you become much more able to deal with the bad. For me, taking in the good is motivated by the recognition that there’s a lot about life is hard." - Dr. Rick Hanson

 http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/10/how-to-build-a-happier-brain/280752/

We can all benefit from taking a moment to learn from our positive experiences. I stand by my assertion that in addition to music itself being good for the brain (making all those neurons fire at once, decoding sensory input in pleasing and healthy synchrony, and filling our synapses with all natural, good-feeling neurotransmitters), that having the positive experiences with other people at music festivals is really a crucial learning experience for everyone.

"I don't think people are looking for the meaning of life so much as the experience of being alive." 
- Joseph Campbell

Music festivals: more real than real life?

As I started out in planning this thesis project, I was excited to dig in to the subject of what a music festival fundamentally 'is', given the high intent required of people to travel long distances in pursuit of an intangible, music-centric experience - and of course, the massive investment of money, time, and social and mental energy they often require. 

I began by asking questions like this:

"Isn't it odd that we have to build these artificial spaces like music festivals (or events like Burning Man), displace ourselves from our daily environments, and insert ourselves somewhere completely foreign surrounded by art and music to finally feel like we get to 'be ourselves'?"

Then I realized that maybe this analysis was...backwards.  

Maybe the current state of our daily lives, at least in Western, industrialized societies, with their tendency toward incredible and often unfulfilling repetition (whether in school, work, job hunting, cleaning, rising to and completing mundane daily responsibilities), and the general trend toward social isolation and fragmented, superficial communications through social media, is actually more of an artificial construct than the closely knit, self-reliant community that we can experience at a music festival, a community that works, cooperates, experiences and celebrates closely and together.

Maybe the music festival experience is more true to human nature than the modern lives we feel  driven to flee, just to feel more alive.

Seen in this way, the kinds of novelty-seeking people chase at a music festival could be about more than just having fun, but also about the self-education our current cultural infrastructures fail to provide. We learn quickly when we have to adapt to new situations, and as Maslow suggested, healthier, fully actualized individuals deal with the unexpected and even crises in life, with more creativity, spontaneity and equanimity. Maybe it's just as important for culture that we have opportunities to pull ourselves out of our daily structures and environments and throw ourselves headfirst in to completely different, spontaneous, even chaotic situations - simply to learn how to deal with them.

Maybe the more we experiment and the farther away from the norm we can get ourselves, the better we can deal with those moments when our daily experience of 'normal' goes completely off-script.

We must manufacture places to chase serendipity.

Perhaps these escapist tendencies and celebrations actually serve us better than our daily routines.

Who knows, but it's fascinating to ponder.

First set of possible design intervention areas for music festival experiences

After fully absorbing my survey data, which was inspiring in itself, I've done some sketching and pondering what I learned. I've come up with several areas that might be worth exploring further around festival experiences - areas that seem to be meaningful and important to people about their experiences, and that aren't necessarily formally supported by any current festival offerings. I'm not a fan of flimsy, maudlin positive sentiments, and the intensity with which people shared their feelings about these areas of experience seems to suggest their real importance in many people's lives.

So far the areas I'm looking at designing some kind of possible support systems for are below. They roughly align to the pre-festival, during-festival and post-festival experience areas.

•  the 'after the festival' positive feeling: expressing, harnessing or sharing it, making it useful to you and other people

• connecting *you* to music: your music, your music community, the personal significance and history of your own music tastes, activities and listening

• supporting self-development and self-exploration at festival: looking at who you are, who you are at a music festival, who do you want to be, who do you want become in the future, personal goals, etc.

• the festival community at large and music festival history: sharing experiences, memories, and recording what often goes unrecorded and forgotten

• the novel, serendipitous or unexpected experience: social connections and experiences, or unusual, out-of-the-ordinary vibrant life experiences

• tribalism, nomadism, or visually expressing membership in a larger, geographically-agnostic community

• music festival experiences over a lifetime: families, music festivals and aging audiences

Reflections on Americanization, Escapism

 I've been thinking about what a drive to attend music festivals means, culturally, for our zeitgeist, and trying to collect thoughts on the subject. Here are a few:

"The development of popular culture from the novel via the image to the triumph of popular music and the "center-less'' heterogeneity of television, created forms of cultural expression that are singularly useful for the purposes of imaginary self-extension and self-empowerment. The result is an increasing separation of expressive elements from moral, social, even narrative contexts. Here is the triumph of "mood over morals.'' Americanization, indeed, is carried by the promise of heightened imaginary self-realization for individuals who are freed from the bonds of social norms and cultural traditions.

Americanization, thus, cannot be viewed as a tacitly engineered hidden cultural takeover but as a process in which individualization is the driving force. This process is most advanced in the US for a number of reasons. The promise of a particular form of individualization provides the explanation why American popular culture finds so much resonance in other societies where it has taken hold almost without resistance (mostly carried by a young generation trying to escape tradition).

Cultural Americanization is thus part of a modernizing process. Americanization is not a form of cultural imperialism, but the embodiment of modernity's promise of painless self-realization for each individual, in contrast to the demands made by more traditional concepts of emancipation. Globalization, which often appears as the triumph of cultural standardization, in reality undermines standardization. No single national culture is the driving force but, instead, globalization is powered by a restless individualism drawing on a growing store of mass symbols. So: we are not becoming Americanized. We "Americanize'' ourselves."
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/invasion-of-the-culture-snatchers- 

"But, judging by the appetite shown worldwide for this narrative, it seems clear that identification with such adventures is almost universal. It seems to speak to a deep longing in men – and in the women who also enjoy these films and TV shows – for a time in one’s life when one could dash toward freedom, adventure, and self-reinvention, unencumbered by social ties and family obligations."
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-great-escapism

But, judging by the appetite shown worldwide for this narrative, it seems clear that identification with such adventures is almost universal. It seems to speak to a deep longing in men – and in the women who also enjoy these films and TV shows – for a time in one’s life when one could dash toward freedom, adventure, and self-reinvention, unencumbered by social ties and family obligations.
Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-great-escapism#cad7sqvVLYRCHBpQ.99

The characteristic form by which music activates the imagination is by short evocations of out-of-context images, or a diffuse feeling of boundlessness, both of which need not be integrated into any meaningful context. Listeners to popular music need not ``earn'' their aesthetic experience through participation. Contrary to prior visual forms of cultural expression, including the movies, there is no longer a need for continuity in the flow of images; contrary to what happens with a novel, no mental translation is required because the sensual effect of music creates associations that are shaped not by narrative but by mood.

CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphThe development of popular culture from the novel via the image to the triumph of popular music and the ``center-less'' heterogeneity of television, created forms of cultural expression that are singularly useful for the purposes of imaginary self-extension and self-empowerment. The result is an increasing separation of expressive elements from moral, social, even narrative contexts. Here is the triumph of ``mood over morals.'' Americanization, indeed, is carried by the promise of heightened imaginary self-realization for individuals who are freed from the bonds of social norms and cultural traditions.

CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphAmericanization, thus, cannot be viewed as a tacitly engineered hidden cultural takeover but as a process in which individualization is the driving force. This process is most advanced in the US for a number of reasons. The promise of a particular form of individualization provides the explanation why American popular culture finds so much resonance in other societies where it has taken hold almost without resistance (mostly carried by a young generation trying to escape tradition).

CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphCultural Americanization is thus part of a modernizing process. Americanization is not a form of cultural imperialism, but the embodiment of modernity's promise of painless self-realization for each individual, in contrast to the demands made by more traditional concepts of emancipation. Globalization, which often appears as the triumph of cultural standardization, in reality undermines standardization. No single national culture is the driving force but, instead, globalization is powered by a restless individualism drawing on a growing store of mass symbols. So: we are not becoming Americanized. We ``Americanize'' ourselves.

Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/invasion-of-the-culture-snatchers-#Vq5o4XgFmo2CWZ2q.99

The characteristic form by which music activates the imagination is by short evocations of out-of-context images, or a diffuse feeling of boundlessness, both of which need not be integrated into any meaningful context. Listeners to popular music need not ``earn'' their aesthetic experience through participation. Contrary to prior visual forms of cultural expression, including the movies, there is no longer a need for continuity in the flow of images; contrary to what happens with a novel, no mental translation is required because the sensual effect of music creates associations that are shaped not by narrative but by mood.

CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphThe development of popular culture from the novel via the image to the triumph of popular music and the ``center-less'' heterogeneity of television, created forms of cultural expression that are singularly useful for the purposes of imaginary self-extension and self-empowerment. The result is an increasing separation of expressive elements from moral, social, even narrative contexts. Here is the triumph of ``mood over morals.'' Americanization, indeed, is carried by the promise of heightened imaginary self-realization for individuals who are freed from the bonds of social norms and cultural traditions.

CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphAmericanization, thus, cannot be viewed as a tacitly engineered hidden cultural takeover but as a process in which individualization is the driving force. This process is most advanced in the US for a number of reasons. The promise of a particular form of individualization provides the explanation why American popular culture finds so much resonance in other societies where it has taken hold almost without resistance (mostly carried by a young generation trying to escape tradition).

CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphCultural Americanization is thus part of a modernizing process. Americanization is not a form of cultural imperialism, but the embodiment of modernity's promise of painless self-realization for each individual, in contrast to the demands made by more traditional concepts of emancipation. Globalization, which often appears as the triumph of cultural standardization, in reality undermines standardization. No single national culture is the driving force but, instead, globalization is powered by a restless individualism drawing on a growing store of mass symbols. So: we are not becoming Americanized. We ``Americanize'' ourselves.

Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/invasion-of-the-culture-snatchers-#Vq5o4XgFmo2CWZ2q.99

The characteristic form by which music activates the imagination is by short evocations of out-of-context images, or a diffuse feeling of boundlessness, both of which need not be integrated into any meaningful context. Listeners to popular music need not ``earn'' their aesthetic experience through participation. Contrary to prior visual forms of cultural expression, including the movies, there is no longer a need for continuity in the flow of images; contrary to what happens with a novel, no mental translation is required because the sensual effect of music creates associations that are shaped not by narrative but by mood.

CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphThe development of popular culture from the novel via the image to the triumph of popular music and the ``center-less'' heterogeneity of television, created forms of cultural expression that are singularly useful for the purposes of imaginary self-extension and self-empowerment. The result is an increasing separation of expressive elements from moral, social, even narrative contexts. Here is the triumph of ``mood over morals.'' Americanization, indeed, is carried by the promise of heightened imaginary self-realization for individuals who are freed from the bonds of social norms and cultural traditions.

CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphAmericanization, thus, cannot be viewed as a tacitly engineered hidden cultural takeover but as a process in which individualization is the driving force. This process is most advanced in the US for a number of reasons. The promise of a particular form of individualization provides the explanation why American popular culture finds so much resonance in other societies where it has taken hold almost without resistance (mostly carried by a young generation trying to escape tradition).

CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphCultural Americanization is thus part of a modernizing process. Americanization is not a form of cultural imperialism, but the embodiment of modernity's promise of painless self-realization for each individual, in contrast to the demands made by more traditional concepts of emancipation. Globalization, which often appears as the triumph of cultural standardization, in reality undermines standardization. No single national culture is the driving force but, instead, globalization is powered by a restless individualism drawing on a growing store of mass symbols. So: we are not becoming Americanized. We ``Americanize'' ourselves.

Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/invasion-of-the-culture-snatchers-#Vq5o4XgFmo2CWZ2q.99

The characteristic form by which music activates the imagination is by short evocations of out-of-context images, or a diffuse feeling of boundlessness, both of which need not be integrated into any meaningful context. Listeners to popular music need not ``earn'' their aesthetic experience through participation. Contrary to prior visual forms of cultural expression, including the movies, there is no longer a need for continuity in the flow of images; contrary to what happens with a novel, no mental translation is required because the sensual effect of music creates associations that are shaped not by narrative but by mood.

CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphThe development of popular culture from the novel via the image to the triumph of popular music and the ``center-less'' heterogeneity of television, created forms of cultural expression that are singularly useful for the purposes of imaginary self-extension and self-empowerment. The result is an increasing separation of expressive elements from moral, social, even narrative contexts. Here is the triumph of ``mood over morals.'' Americanization, indeed, is carried by the promise of heightened imaginary self-realization for individuals who are freed from the bonds of social norms and cultural traditions.

CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphAmericanization, thus, cannot be viewed as a tacitly engineered hidden cultural takeover but as a process in which individualization is the driving force. This process is most advanced in the US for a number of reasons. The promise of a particular form of individualization provides the explanation why American popular culture finds so much resonance in other societies where it has taken hold almost without resistance (mostly carried by a young generation trying to escape tradition).

CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphCultural Americanization is thus part of a modernizing process. Americanization is not a form of cultural imperialism, but the embodiment of modernity's promise of painless self-realization for each individual, in contrast to the demands made by more traditional concepts of emancipation. Globalization, which often appears as the triumph of cultural standardization, in reality undermines standardization. No single national culture is the driving force but, instead, globalization is powered by a restless individualism drawing on a growing store of mass symbols. So: we are not becoming Americanized. We ``Americanize'' ourselves.

Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/invasion-of-the-culture-snatchers-#Vq5o4XgFmo2CWZ2q.99