In a classic 1953 article about learning to smoke marijuana, Howard Becker writes âthat the presence of a given kind of behavior is the result of a sequence of social experiences during which the person acquires a conception of the meaning of the behavior, and the perceptions and judgments of objects and situations, all of which make the activity possible and desirable. Thus, the motivation or disposition to engage in the activity is built up in the course of learning to engage in itâŚâ (Becker 1953:235). Becker is here arguing against a conception that certain traits of the individual account for the use of the substance in favor of a model wherein a learned, positive definition of the situation and activity are key to understanding who does and doesnât use marijuana.
To extend Beckerâs work to the realm of action sports, and mountain biking in particular, we might say that one learns to become a mountain biker not only by learning proper body position on the bike, techniques on the trail, and strength and stamina of the body, but by adopting an understanding of the activity that is positive, pleasurable, and resonates with other participants. So how does one become a mountain biker? And is everyone who rides a bike on trails through the woods a mountain biker?
My interest in this began several years ago when my then pre-teen son, Ben, began spending more and more time on his bike; he and his friends would spend weeks in the woods building trails. They spent all of their birthday money on trail-building equipment and bike parts. Soon I began to notice that when he and his friends were riding in the back seat of the car, Iâd hear, âweâve got to session that drop today,â or â[insert famous riderâs name] is killing it at Highland today.â Gibberish. They began adopting a new language, referring to tricks, riders, places, and much more with an in-group vernacular, yet they were only beginning to ride with others. And they were 12. They were becoming mountain bikers in a way that I struggled to understand. I set out to uncover how people find their way into this subculture, learning not only the skills but the subcultural know-how, the style, and the pleasures of the identity of being a mountain biker. While they had little contact with other riders on the trail, they were gaining information and adopting a particular sensibility through online viewing and interaction in a way that appeared to speed up their acceptance as full members of this action sport.
This paper explores how people enter into this subculture and how they become members of a tribe. Originally I had imagined that this was a single subculture but, as I will describe below, the various disciplines of mountain biking and the decentralized local communities that have emerged suggest that a proliferation of idiocultures, small groups with their own norms and identity (Fine 1979), coexist alongside a more unified but very loosely defined culture of mountain biking. While my interest was sparked by these young people, I did not focus on young riders and spent as much time with those over 50 as those under 25 and with people who were pioneers in the mountain biking world alongside those who had ridden for the first time only a year or two ago. I discovered that new information and communication technologies (ICTs) are tools that facilitate membership into this sport at the same time that physical presence and embodied participation remain at the heart of activity itself.
Subculture and identity
Much action sports research treats at least core members as participants in and creators of subcultures that often explicitly reject the dominant competitive, aggressive, profit-driven ethos of many mainstream sports (Beal 1995, 1996; Donnelly and Young 1988; Olivier 2010; Thorpe and Wheaton n.d.; Wheaton 2003, 2004). Subcultures define the meaning of the sport, the norms of play, and often the styleâfrom clothing to ridingâthat come to characterize members. Often core participants, those who are the most highly committed, skilled, and at the pinnacle of the sport and the social group (Dupont 2014) influence the values and attitudes of other participants, in essence defining the authentic participant. Subcultural capital, including brand knowledge (Wheaton and Beal 2003), possession of key objects, and authentic performance (Dupont 2014) can be determined or arbitrated by core participants since their affirmation of a performance, item, or style carries much more weight than participants outside of this group.
Donnelly and Young (1988) use the concept of career to help understand how people become members of sports subcultures. They propose a 4-stage model of career that moves someone from presocialization, a process of acquiring information before making contact with the subculture, all the way through to acceptance within or ostracism from the group. Following this information-gathering first step is a process of selection and recruitment wherein potential members must demonstrate appropriate interest and motivation. The third stage, socialization is a process of learning the appropriate skills (as in Beckerâs marijuana users) and the values, symbols, and roles of the group. Finally, for full belonging, these skills, attitudes, motivations, and the like must be accepted by the group in order to achieve belonging.
Widdicombe and Wooffitt (1990) make the distinction between being and doing, the difference between performing in a particular way and being accepted into a subcultural group. They argue that social comparison between groups helps members achieve belonging and a sense of authenticity. Motivation, they find, operates as a âlinguistic resourceâ that members use to differentiate between groups or between members of a group. A person with shallow reasons for joining is less authentic than the one with deeper motivations. This distinction between being and doing may be âpart of the corpus of common-sense cultural knowledge through which people reason about their social worldâ (Widdicombe and Wooffitt 1990:274).
Wheaton (2003) documented the importance of motivation in windsurfing. While she describes windsurfing as a âmultilayered leisure subcultureâ (76) that includes the recreationalist as well as the core participant, for the core, commitment was key. Subcultural identity relies on a value system which requires insider knowledge and commitment. Wheaton (2003) identified three core values of windsurfers: skill, commitment, and consumption of expensive items. While the skill can be learned and the commitment chosen, the consumption of expensive items may serve as a âhidden entry requirementâ (Bourdieu 1978) that may undermine access for many to these sport subcultures. As windsurfers move from beginners to members, they shift from projecting an identity to the outside world to turning to those within the community as their primary referent, caring less about the image projected to outsiders.
Social comparison can play an important role in distinguishing members from others. Thorpe (2004) found that snowboarders use social comparison between themselves and skiers, but that they also distinguish themselves from the broader society. âThe embodied practices of snowboarders act as mechanisms that control access to the culture by selecting and rejecting new members according to overt and covert criteriaâ (Thorpe 2004:182). These criteria include clothing, language, and style. Taste, in fact, is an important signifier of belonging in the group. Snowboarders embodied that difference through adopting baggy clothing even though it was less protective from the elements and appeared less affluent than their skiing counterparts.
Subcultural media, including videos, images, magazines, and the like, created by and for participants, can be an important source of subcultural information. Early forms of subcultural mediaâsurfing or snowboarding magazines, for exampleâwere largely distributed to users from a central production site providing a megaphone for the views of a very small number of producers. The growth of social media, from Instagram to YouTube, has created an entirely different type of platform in which nearly any participant can share their experience. Participants have moved from consumers of subcultural media to be simultaneously producers and consumers, creating the media that they and others will consume, comment upon, and evaluate. Woermann (2012) identifies three functions of media practices in his ethnographic approach to understanding freeskiersâ use of media. Media functions as a form of fun both in its production and as it allows the user to relive the fun or thrilling moment. These practices also function as a reflexive process that allows for self-observation and identity development, including the development of an aesthetic sensibility. And finally, media practices function to spread knowledge. Woermann finds that freeskiers exchange information, opinions, advice, and much more, essentially sharing subcultural knowledge. Through repeated consumption of images, freeskiers develop a ââfeelâ for styleâ that carries over into physical interactions. Woermann (2012) concludes that
âŚsocial media prosumption has transformed the nature of core subcultural practices, such as identity formation, daydreaming, and learning. The reality of freeskiing, that is, the relevant lifeworld of the freeskiers, has thus in part become a screen reality. Interaction and sense making take place simultaneously in a landscape of pristine mountains and in an online mediascape.
While Woermann focuses on elite, skilled skiers, the creation of media content can allow for the voice of a wider range of participants. Mackay and Dallaireâs (Mackay 2016; MacKay and Dallaire 2013) work on the Skirtboarders blog, a blog created by female skateboarders in Montreal, examines how women can create alternative discourses of femininity and can challenge some aspects of skateboarding culture while performing as skateboarders. Despite the male-dominated subcultural media produced by core skateboarders, the blog creates a space for alternative narratives that can then be shared with and accessed by many others, potentially changing the meanings and narrative of the subculture. Dupontâs (2019) analysis of Instagram use among skateboarders similarly examines the space for user-created content but also the judgmentâthrough comments, likes, or silenceâthat can bring acceptance or exclusion in digital spaces similar to the process in the skatepark.
Less has been written about the role of new media in the process of becoming a member of a subculture. Do more participatory forms of media, such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube allow participants to move through the information-gathering, presocialization stage more quickly? Do they provide new ways to signal motivation and interest? Does the model of a 4-stage career accurately describe the process?
