"Every Home Is Wired":
4 -- Towards a Strategic Progressive Rock Community
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Implications for a Changing Society
In a wider societal context, the strategic nature of Prog activities must necessarily remain limited. This is particularly so since the Progressive Rock community is still in a transitional phase towards stronger computer-mediation (parallel to the Internet's transition from niche to mass-appeal medium); while alt.- or rec.music.progressive have existed for over half a decade now -- enough time to form strong online community structures --, many members of the community still remain connected only at a distance, through secondary offline fan networks. Even institutions with their own online places must thus find ways to reach the wider subculture (and perhaps to draw them online). They are, in other words, forced to act tactically within the general marketplace -- as Hayward reports, "some of the more creative engagements with the Internet as an access-distribution system to have emerged to date have been those which operate within the legal boundaries of music industry practice" (36).5 Bit 14
Again, this mirrors the Internet's own development. Since "electronic information is simultaneously everywhere" (McLuhan & Powers 22) the Net limits the hold of domination exercised by traditional, more hardware-bound media, and will create more diversity in the information transmitted and the opinions expressed, but it is nevertheless unlikely to replace these media altogether. However, as a 'younger' medium perhaps naturally it creates a media environment more in tune with today's fundamental cultural structures: "markets are ultimately underwritten, not by economic capital, but by cultural and affective capital" (Shepherd, "Value" 203). Specifically, for example "the 'music industry' is ... made up of complex and contradictory structures which are constantly shifting, not only as a result of their own internal dynamics, but also as a result of major changes in the corporate, economic and political climates around them" (Shepherd, "Value" 183), and so it was only a matter of time, perhaps, until its internal divisions were also reflected by the visibly fragmenting outside of what has long appeared as an industrial monolith. Bit 15

Section 4 -- Go on to Bite:

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© 1998 Axel Bruns