"Every Home Is Wired":
3 -- The Progressive Rock Community on the Net
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From Oral Tradition to a Literate Community
Thus, "the distinct cultures that emerge in CMC are grounded in communicative practice. Community is generated through the interplay between preexisting structures and the participants' strategic [for de Certeau, tactical] appropriation and exploitation of the resources and rules those structures offer in ongoing interaction" (Baym 139). Identities, relationships, norms, and overall subcultural knowledge and myths of the Prog community on the Internet are formed, maintained, refined, and propagated through this practice in newsgroups and similar fora; this constitutes a perpetual process that might well be likened to a similar community-based passing-on of information and values in pre-literate societies. Bit 67
While the forms of communication found on the largely ephemeral newsgroups are thus similar to oral tradition, however, certain amounts of knowledge and beliefs can eventually be fixed on Web sites and in FAQs in the way they were fixed, in human history, following the development of systems of writing. This fixing is unlikely to make newsgroups obsolete any more than writing made face-to-face conversation obsolete, though: only widely accepted information (centrally, thus, the well-established answers to frequently asked questions) can be fixed without creating further debate, and especially in a so highly heterogeneous community as that of Prog fans much will therefore be left open for discussion; thus, the Prog community's newsgroups remain valued communal assets, since they allow community and individual identities to be defined, refined, and redefined. Bit 68

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© 1998 Axel Bruns