Why do electro dancers also dance on YouTube? The media logic of the cultural practices in the electro dance youth style

Abstract

ABSTRACT The notion of media logic is one of relevance in the recent debates around mediatization theories. Fundamentally applied to macrolevel, institution-focused analysis, this notion has not often been applied to narrower domains of cultural practice nor used as a conceptual point of departure in this regard. This article puts forward a three-pronged analytical scheme for the discussion of the media logic underlying the cultural production of electro dance, a dance-based, urban youth style born in Paris and spread globally over the past decade under the influence of digital media. Ethnographic attention is paid to a group of electro dancers and their YouTube-based practices to empirically understand how the cultural and social dimensions of the youth group life are crucially shaped by emerging communication forms that respond to a specific (media) logic. The article concludes by suggesting the transferability of the proposed conceptual scheme to better understand other microlevel, group-related mediatized phenomena.