Tinkering and Tethering

This chapter considers children’s MP3 players from a “material culture” perspective. This approach reveals that children emphasized the tangibility of their MP3 players as objects more than as devices for communication or data storage. Children’s MP3 players were thoroughly domesticated within an intimate and childish material culture already characterized by playful physical interaction and portable objects such as toys, trading cards, and dolls that can be shared, manipulated, and held close, and in a culture of embodied participation that emphasizes touch, physical closeness, and movement. Children’s interest in the materiality of their devices has implications for understanding their conceptions of sound, music, and circulation. It decenters adult values of fidelity in sound recordings. It also provides an important link for understanding how MP3 players are incorporated as authentic elements into existing cultures of childhood and thus inflected with the peer cultural solidarity that characterizes children’s expressive culture in schools.