Uploaded November 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 day ago
This video will blow you away. Anyone who spends time online has encountered some version of this message, whether in a friend’s post, a corporation’s advertisement, or a video’s own description. When the promise is fulfilled, we experience virtuosity: skill made apparent and socially meaningful. Yet such widespread online encounters are also peculiarly individualized, driven by algorithmic recommendations based on each user’s data. This lecture discusses online performances by a cluster of guitarists (centered around Kaki King and Jon Gomm) to shed light on virtuosity in this era of digital streaming. It combines first-person phenomenology and critical voices from music and media studies to explore how streaming platforms in general (and YouTube in particular) structure mediated encounters with virtuosic bodies. I examine three different (if frequently overlapping) paths through streaming media: 1) “only what I came for,” the path platforms attempt to nudge us beyond, 2) accelerated fandom, and 3) surfing the algorithm. Reflecting on these paths reveals how digital architecture and the algorithms operating within it exercise a social power that we regularly experience, even if their technical workings remain opaque. The very intimacy of the encounter—platforms provide individual recommendations for content that we stream in our homes on devices that serve as constant companions—readily turns our interpretive concerns back on ourselves. Our values and judgments are already temporally “on all sides” of experience, and algorithmic recommendations increasingly replicate these subjective contributions to experience in the media objects themselves, leading to simultaneous intensifications and crises of value.
The Surface Changes by Kaki King • youtube.com/watch?v=ziPD16xCBBg
Jon Gomm - Passionflower • youtube.com/watch?v=nY7GnAq6Znw
For more information on this and other happenings at the college, visit Home | Johnson County Community College .
This video will blow you away. Anyone who spends time online has encountered some version of this message, whether in a friend’s post, a corporation’s advertisement, or a video’s own description. When the promise is fulfilled, we experience virtuosity: skill made apparent and socially meaningful. Yet such widespread online encounters are also peculiarly individualized, driven by algorithmic recommendations based on each user’s data. This lecture discusses online performances by a cluster of guitarists (centered around Kaki King and Jon Gomm) to shed light on virtuosity in this era of digital streaming. It combines first-person phenomenology and critical voices from music and media studies to explore how streaming platforms in general (and YouTube in particular) structure mediated encounters with virtuosic bodies. I examine three different (if frequently overlapping) paths through streaming media: 1) “only what I came for,” the path platforms attempt to nudge us beyond, 2) accelerated fandom, and 3) surfing the algorithm. Reflecting on these paths reveals how digital architecture and the algorithms operating within it exercise a social power that we regularly experience, even if their technical workings remain opaque. The very intimacy of the encounter—platforms provide individual recommendations for content that we stream in our homes on devices that serve as constant companions—readily turns our interpretive concerns back on ourselves. Our values and judgments are already temporally “on all sides” of experience, and algorithmic recommendations increasingly replicate these subjective contributions to experience in the media objects themselves, leading to simultaneous intensifications and crises of value.
The Surface Changes by Kaki King • youtube.com/watch?v=ziPD16xCBBg
Jon Gomm - Passionflower • youtube.com/watch?v=nY7GnAq6Znw
For more information on this and other happenings at the college, visit Home | Johnson County Community College .
