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

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

The structure of Internet services like newsgroups and the Web also helps the interests of such subcultural communities rather than those of the mainstream industry: if on the Net "anyone can produce a publication, but the right to do so means little without distribution, resources, and publicity" (Herman & McChesney 125), cultural producers who are firmly embedded in a subculture will be much better positioned to make use of community resources and word-of-mouth publicity than external individuals and organisations (distribution of information, of course, is taken care of by the Net itself). Similarly, members of a subculture will have an access far more directly reaching their exact target audience than the media companies' large-scale 'hit-and-miss' marketing to a fairly heterogeneous public, simply by pointing to their community-based information resources and services on the communication channels (for example, the newsgroups) central to the community.	Bit 50
The mediascape (to use Appadurai's term) emerging from such subcultural uses, then, will "not be the product of one group or controlling organisation, but involve complex negotiations and struggles around the pulling together of different elements", as Longhurst believes (53). This fits well with the fact, too, that members of many non-mainstream subcultures are already generally cynical towards the actions and agendas of the major transnational music corporations. "It is too early to tell ... whether the economic hold of the international industry has begun to weaken in the face of newer modes of self- and small production in the advancing information age. Popular music production is still very much dominated by corporate giants, even though myriad small, regional music companies exist in the 'outback,' the periphery of every country" (Campbell Robinson et al. 249). An effect of the existence of such companies, and of their and fan communities' use of the Net, though, is to keep 'their' musical genres alive, active, and even commercially viable on a reduced scale long after a genre has departed from the mainstream.¹³ Subcultural Net communities even revive genres that have fallen out of fashion: although for now "the mass media remain the dominant institutions for the circulation of both news and the cultural resources that help create identity formations through 'imagined communities', the electronic networks begin to provide networked nodes that can offer accessible alternatives" (Friedland 207).	Bit 51

The structure of Internet services like newsgroups and the Web also helps the interests of such subcultural communities rather than those of the mainstream industry: if on the Net "anyone can produce a publication, but the right to do so means little without distribution, resources, and publicity" (Herman & McChesney 125), cultural producers who are firmly embedded in a subculture will be much better positioned to make use of community resources and word-of-mouth publicity than external individuals and organisations (distribution of information, of course, is taken care of by the Net itself). Similarly, members of a subculture will have an access far more directly reaching their exact target audience than the media companies' large-scale 'hit-and-miss' marketing to a fairly heterogeneous public, simply by pointing to their community-based information resources and services on the communication channels (for example, the newsgroups) central to the community.

Bit 50

The mediascape (to use Appadurai's term) emerging from such subcultural uses, then, will "not be the product of one group or controlling organisation, but involve complex negotiations and struggles around the pulling together of different elements", as Longhurst believes (53). This fits well with the fact, too, that members of many non-mainstream subcultures are already generally cynical towards the actions and agendas of the major transnational music corporations. "It is too early to tell ... whether the economic hold of the international industry has begun to weaken in the face of newer modes of self- and small production in the advancing information age. Popular music production is still very much dominated by corporate giants, even though myriad small, regional music companies exist in the 'outback,' the periphery of every country" (Campbell Robinson et al. 249). An effect of the existence of such companies, and of their and fan communities' use of the Net, though, is to keep 'their' musical genres alive, active, and even commercially viable on a reduced scale long after a genre has departed from the mainstream.¹³ Subcultural Net communities even revive genres that have fallen out of fashion: although for now "the mass media remain the dominant institutions for the circulation of both news and the cultural resources that help create identity formations through 'imagined communities', the electronic networks begin to provide networked nodes that can offer accessible alternatives" (Friedland 207).

Bit 51

Section 1 -- Go on to Bite:

1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27	28	29	30
31	32	33	34	35