Abstract

This article analyses the role of music digital innovations in shaping the social practice of musical consumption. It faces with this research object presenting an analytical frame useful for understanding of the relation between ordinary users and everyday technologies, in so doing focussing on three different analytic dimensions: the symbolic, the cognitive and the pragmatic ones. Therefore this analytical frame is applied in order to understand the processes of appropriation of digital music technologies, thought the analysis of 20 in-depth qualitative interviews with users of digital music devices. Firstly, it's shown how new technologies need to be culturally interpreted by users, and how meanings generated around technologies can be converted in social resources mobilized for listening music as well as for interacting with other people. Secondly, it's considered how technical competences and knowledge represent a key element in shaping the uses of digital music and also how they are embedded in social relations, at the same time shaping the appropriation of technologies and transforming people's social interaction. Finally, the role of the pragmatic interaction between people and technical object is addressed, stressing how social practices emerge as the result of a mutual "co-construction" process occurring between cultural, relational and material dimensions of people's everyday life.