"Every Home Is Wired": 1 -- The Net in Relation to Music Subcultures

"Every Home Is Wired":
1 -- The Net in Relation to Music Subcultures

Implications of CMC Characteristics for Internet Music Communities
Therefore, if the media carried by the Net -- in particular, newsgroups and the Web -- are to a significant extent used for music-related discourse, and if they are also particularly well-suited for the formation and maintenance of specialised, but not always geographically uniform taste and style communities, as has become clear, it is important to ask how the specific characteristics of Internet or generally computer-mediated communication (CMC) affect music discourse on the Net. The question, thus, must be: how does the formation of a subcultural community (through distinction from other communities), the identification of the individual with the subculture (its members, both fellow fans and musicians), and thus the formation of the individual's own identity as a member of that subcultural community (the individual's self-definition as a fan) take place on the Net, especially in the light of the communicatory restrictions CMC appears to exhibit in comparison with face-to-face communication, the traditional medium of community interaction?	Bit 33
Using the Progressive Rock online community as an example, this question will be answered in detail in the following sections of this paper. First, some fundamental characteristics of the central interactive media of the Internet, newsgroups and the Web, must be noted. Newsgroups are based on free and (beyond the topic division itself) relatively unstructured conversation, the Web on the voluntary provision of information that is searchable through a variety of services like Yahoo!; both are founded, thus, on principles of the free availability and flow of information from a wide range of sources, creating a body of information which therefore is pluralistic and possibly internally contradictory. Furthermore, every participant is also invited to be a sender of information as much as a receiver: "if connected to cyberspace, ... every user has the potential to be an author, to put information on the net which can be transmitted to the world. There will be no teacher, editor, publisher or bookseller to vet or validate what goes public; it could soon mean the end of the rejection slip and the demise of the gatekeeper", as Spender points out (86) -- the readers of newsgroups and Web sites thus become researchers, gatekeepers, selectors and receivers of information in one.	Bit 34

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