"Every Home Is Wired":
3 -- The Progressive Rock Community on the Net
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The effect of such more particular newsgroups and mailing-lists, then, is to allow r.m.p to cover its wide range of topics without them being drowned out by a few high-volume ones -- the newsgroups and mailing-lists of the Progressive Rock community thus form a range of more or less specific fora for the various interests of its members. Bit 12
The online Prog community can therefore be seen as using a network of resources for its interaction. The possibility of using a variety of clearly subdivided newsgroups for special sections of a subcultural community is a particular feature of the hierarchical newsgroup system, of course, as shown already; "Usenet has institutionalised eight general thematic categories and has developed a range of conventions to describe and delineate the kinds of activity and contributions that [each] group considers desirable and appropriate. The names serve not only to identify what is desired in a group, but what is inappropriate as well" (Kollock & Smith 111-2).5 Bit 13
It can be pointed out once again, too, that Prog resources on the Net constitute a further tactical use of the Internet: they are related to la perruque. "La perruque is the worker's own work disguised as work for his [sic] employer. It differs from pilfering in that nothing of material value is stolen. It differs from absenteeism in that the worker is officially on the job" (de Certeau 25), but while on the job (that is, while using business or student accounts, usually), users read and participate in newsgroups, maintain Web sites, or access online stores, with some of the Web sites also using 'official' Web storage space to tactical ends. Far more fundamentally, too, the recreational or alternative uses symbolised in the newsgroup hierarchy abbreviations circumvent the Net's original military and scientific purposes. Bit 14

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© 1998 Axel Bruns