"Every Home Is Wired":
2 -- The Progressive Rock Subculture and the Net
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In addition to its breakdown of ideological divisions in art, Prog has also always been interested in combining various art forms.24 "The progressive rock bricolage constitutes a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk in which music, visual motifs, and verbal expression are inextricably intertwined to convey a coherent artistic vision" (Macan 11) -- today, the term 'multimedia' expresses the same notion, and again the continuing development of the Internet into a multimedial meta-medium can thus make it well-equipped to support Progressive Rock.25 This, then, finally also points to a fit of consumption patterns between Progressive Rock and the Internet: especially since the emergence of CD-ROM drives as a basic feature of home computers, users are now frequently listening to music on CD while computing. Similar to the trend towards longer songs and a focus on entire albums rather than individual pieces that was created by the long (and frequently drug-enhanced) listening sessions favoured in countercultural times, lengthy Internet sessions may today also induce a return to longer uninterrupted periods of music consumption, and thus further the demise of the pop single; additionally, the use of music as a soundtrack for computer use also disadvantages musical styles like disco or techno that are mainly meant as rhythms to dance to. For the combination of the aural medium of music with the visually-based parts of computing and the Internet, then, Prog and other styles that fit these modes of consumption are preferred. Bit 45
A Homology between Progressive Rock Fans and Internet Users
Most centrally, however, the strong showing of the Prog community on the Net can be traced to a strong similarity between typical Prog fans and typical Internet participants that makes both groups likely to overlap significantly. There is a general homology of personal characteristics and overall ideology which is beneficial to Prog's presence on the Net -- as Macan states, the "cultural power" of a musical style "will ultimately depend on the degree to which it fulfils the role of self-definition among a group of people", after all (221).26 Bit 46

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© 1998 Axel Bruns