"Every Home Is Wired": 4 -- Towards a Strategic Progressive Rock Community

"Every Home Is Wired":
4 -- Towards a Strategic Progressive Rock Community

Thus, largely as a result of its online presence the Progressive Rock community emerges as a strategic community, with its own spaces. As de Certeau points out, "strategies are able to produce, tabulate, and impose these spaces, when those operations take place, whereas tactics can only use, manipulate, and divert these spaces" (30); having long used the music market- and mediaplace tactically, Prog has now taken over a small part of it, and re-created that place as its own. In this move, the accumulation of a 'critical mass' of community members persistently staking Prog's claim to that space has been central: only when enough people agree on the tactics continually used to manipulate a space, these communal tactics can eventually turn into established subcultural strategies. The gathering of this critical mass was achieved, of course, mostly through the use of newsgroups and mailing-lists as meeting-places for community members; they also gradually accumulated the ideas and norms which now, through FAQs, serve as the ground rules for the established online places of Progressive Rock. Newsgroups (along with Web sites, as additional reservoirs of knowledge) are therefore the central places for this strategic Prog community⁴ -- although in the general context of the Internet they may constitute a tactical use of technology.	Bit 12

Thus, largely as a result of its online presence the Progressive Rock community emerges as a strategic community, with its own spaces. As de Certeau points out, "strategies are able to produce, tabulate, and impose these spaces, when those operations take place, whereas tactics can only use, manipulate, and divert these spaces" (30); having long used the music market- and mediaplace tactically, Prog has now taken over a small part of it, and re-created that place as its own. In this move, the accumulation of a 'critical mass' of community members persistently staking Prog's claim to that space has been central: only when enough people agree on the tactics continually used to manipulate a space, these communal tactics can eventually turn into established subcultural strategies. The gathering of this critical mass was achieved, of course, mostly through the use of newsgroups and mailing-lists as meeting-places for community members; they also gradually accumulated the ideas and norms which now, through FAQs, serve as the ground rules for the established online places of Progressive Rock. Newsgroups (along with Web sites, as additional reservoirs of knowledge) are therefore the central places for this strategic Prog community⁴ -- although in the general context of the Internet they may constitute a tactical use of technology.

Bit 12

Section 4 -- Go on to Bite:

1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18