Digital countercultures and the struggle for community / Jessa Lingel.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lingel, Jessa (Jessica), 1983- author.

Contributor:

George R. Fink Memorial Fund.

Series:

Information society series

The information society series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Internet--Social aspects--United States.

Internet.

Internet users--United States.

Internet users.

Subculture--United States.

Subculture.

Digital media.

Internet--Social aspects.

United States.

Social interaction--United States.

Social interaction.

Digital media--United States.

Physical Description:

viii, 178 pages : illustrations, map ; 24 cm.

Other Title:

Digital countercultures

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2017]

Summary:

Whether by accidental keystroke or deliberate tinkering, technology is often used in ways that are unintended and unimagined by its designers and inventors. Jessa Lingel offers an account of digital technology use that looks beyond Silicon Valley and college dropouts-turned-entrepreneurs. Instead, Lingel tells stories from the margins of countercultural communities that have made the Internet meet their needs, subverting established norms of how digital technologies should be used. Lingel presents three case studies that contrast the imagined uses of the web to its lived and often messy practicalities. She examines a social media platform (developed long before Facebook) for body modification enthusiasts, with early web experiments in blogging, community, wikis, online dating, and podcasts; a network of communication technologies (both analog and digital) developed by a local community of punk rockers to manage information about underground shows; and the use of Facebook and Instagram for both promotional and community purposes by Brooklyn drag queens. Drawing on years of fieldwork, Lingel explores issues of alterity and community, inclusivity and exclusivity, secrecy and surveillance, and anonymity and self-promotion. By examining online life in terms of countercultural communities, Lingel argues that looking at outsider experiences helps us to imagine new uses and possibilities for the tools and platforms we use in everyday life.

Contents:

Introduction

Frameworks for technology and communities of alterity

The death and life of great online subcultures: an analysis of body modification ezine

They came from the basement: tactics of secrecy in New Brunswick's underground punk community

Fight for your platform to party: Brooklyn drag and the battle for a queerer Facebook

Countercultural values for theory and in design.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the George R. Fink Memorial Fund.

ISBN:

9780262036214

0262036215

OCLC:

958796566