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Paper short abstract:

Using ethnographic case studies from research on social media musicking among Spanish migrants in London, this paper analyses how music rituals are enacted on secular and religious social media spaces focusing on three case studies: music memes, music games, and celebrity mourning practices.

Paper long abstract:

Media circulation rituals are foundational stones of online communication, allowing users to articulate morality and values and contribute to sociality. Social media activities can also be considered moral in themselves (Miller et al. 2016), but the crucial role of music practices in this mediascape is still unascertained. Using ethnographic case studies from my research on social media musicking among Spanish migrants in London, I analyse how music rituals are enacted on social media focusing on three case studies: music memes, music games, and celebrity mourning practices. Social media constitutes a space where moral actions are subject to adjudication (Miller 2012), and a medium to develop parasocial interactions with others and the supernatural realm through the circulation and exchange of sacralised music items. These interactions are made possible by the users' tacit understanding of imagined modes of listening. Similarly, musicking rituals on social media help users to establish norms and values of taste, affect, and behaviour, often using symbolic and imagined elements of visual music media. Consequently, in online communication music media becomes a ritualised form of vernacular grammar that is used to participate in group sociality, connecting the mundane and the everyday with the eternal and the moral. In conclusion, musicking practices of circulation and exchange of music on social media constitute online forms of ritualised exchange of music commodities and knowledge, in which users expand and enrich their social lives by sending music into a partially unknown social circle from which they may not receive anything in return.