Playing With Visibility: Underground Electronic/Dance Music Culture in the Smartphone Era

Abstract

The adoption of smartphones has reconfigured the situational contexts in which people imagine, understand, and, in turn, calibrate the visibility of their self-expression, information sharing, and relationship building. This article expounds on how participants of underground electronic dance music culture (EDMC) maintained their shared culture of secrecy with the advent of smartphones. Drawing on an autoethnography that spanned 20 nights at live music events and 27 semistructured interviews with promoters and attendees, I bring attention to how their spatial-temporal tactics of smartphone use (and non-use) not only served as the means of secrecy—but also bolstered the corporeal, affective experience of scene participation. I thus developed visibility play as a concept to describe the tactical configuration of visibility grounded in the playful experience of joy and pleasure.