"Every Home Is Wired":
2 -- The Progressive Rock Subculture and the Net
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New generations of subcultural members have also emerged, then: a second generation of Progressive Rock fans joined in the 1980s, and a third followed with the move to a CMC-enhanced community in the 90s; the Internet, similarly, has recently seen a dramatic influx of new users due to the popularity of the Web. This mix of older members and new followers is itself a further similarity: both subcultures have 'grown up' and moved beyond the counterculture. Some early members have settled, and perhaps even become owners of software houses or music labels. In these official functions, however, they are frequently still acting tactically, by working alongside the major corporations without subscribing to their business practices. The wider subcultural communities, too, are often using the resources under their control tactically, for example (on the Internet) by using academic or business accounts for community interaction or by creating subcultural Web sites on corporate servers. In de Certeau's terms, these are examples of la perruque, which "reintroduces 'popular' techniques of other times and other places into the industrial space" (26). Bit 55
Some similar technological patterns are also worth noting. In both fields, there is a marked hardware/software dichotomy: they are dependent on hardware (whether Net connectivity and home computers, or instruments, recording technology and hi-fi systems) produced by 'big industry' players outside the subculture, but use this hardware tactically, to their own ends, creating particular subcultural software (computer software and Internet sites, or Prog music) that is outside the hardware providers' control. This is yet another form of excluding subcultural outsiders, and can thus serve to strengthen subcultural identity.32 Bit 56
There is, on the other hand, a feeling of communion between individual software producers as well as between producers and consumers, and often strong cooperation: this takes form in the collective creation of Web sites and the shareware system, or the formation of multitudes of musical side and one-off projects (particularly, for example, in the Canterbury scene or in label-based artist 'stables') and the reissue by specialty labels of albums and live recordings that are particularly sought-after in the community. Bit 57

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© 1998 Axel Bruns