"Every Home Is Wired": 2 -- The Progressive Rock Subculture and the Net

"Every Home Is Wired":
2 -- The Progressive Rock Subculture and the Net

Alternative Channels for Progressive Rock Community Interaction
With this strong disregard for Prog in the major music media there has long been a need for alternative channels that could be used for community information and interaction, in other words, for channels through which the subculture's tactics could be organised and carried out. Traditionally, increasingly elaborate Prog fanzines have filled that role, later supplemented particularly in the U.S. by college radio programmes: "the advent of college radio and the college charts created the possibility that a band could break through to at least cult popularity without the aid of a major record label. ... Local and regional scenes abound ... with artists who put out tapes and records on their own or with the help of independent record companies" (Kruse 33). Today the Internet offers an alternative with even wider reach and even lower production and access costs: "suddenly, the isolated archipelagos of a few hundred or a few thousand people are becoming part of an integrated entity. The small virtual communities still exist, like yeast in a rapidly rising loaf, but increasingly they are part of an overarching culture, similar to the way ... the telegraph and telephone linked the states" in the USA (Rheingold 10). In section three we will see the overarching Progressive Rock fan community that has thus been formed from isolated groups.	Bit 41
There are a number of further indications of a close fit between the Internet and the Prog community. As December points out, the Web and Internet newsgroups are also especially well-suited for addressing certain audience sizes: "the middle range -- audiences of 10 to 10,000 people reached within times ranging from immediate to a day -- is a gap filled by few traditional media. This is too small an audience for mass media and too large an audience for personally controlled (traditional) media. Yet this is the audience and time delay gap that many forms of computer-mediated communication fill" ("Challenges", n. pag.). The Net fills the 'media gap' between small-scale enthusiast publications and the mass media that a newly revitalised community like that of Progressive Rock has been caught in --	Bit 42

Section 2 -- 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