"Every Home Is Wired":
1 -- The Net in Relation to Music Subcultures
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Subcultural Theory in a Segmentalised Environment
It is necessary, then, to devote some attention to the processes involved in subcultural community formation, particularly of musical fan communities on the Internet. Generally, 'culture' refers "to that level at which social groups develop distinct patterns of life, and give expressive form to their social and material life-experience" (J. Clarke et al. 10); subcultures, then, "are sub-sets -- smaller, more localised and differentiated structures within one or other [sic] of the larger cultural networks" (J. Clarke et al. 13). A subculture, as much as a culture itself, thus includes "'maps of meaning' which make things intelligible to its members. ... They are objectivated in the patterns of social organisation and relationship through which the individual becomes a 'social individual'. Culture is the way social relations of a group are structured and shaped: but it is also the way those shapes are experienced, understood and interpreted" (J. Clarke et al. 10-1). Bit 54
For our social positioning as members of a subculture, then, the borders drawn on our 'maps of meaning' become especially important, as subcultural communities attempt to distinguish themselves from one another. In this, music, by virtue of its aural existence as a form of noise, is an especially well-suited tool for community demarcation, as Attali points out: "noise is inscribed from the start within the panoply of power. Equivalent to the articulation of a space, it indicates the limits of a territory and the way to make oneself heard within it, how to survive by drawing one's sustenance from it" (6). Bit 55

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© 1998 Axel Bruns