Digital Leisure, the Internet and Popular Culture

Communities and Identities in a Digital Age

Karl Spracklen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781349680771
  9781137405869
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137405876
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Ciencias computacionales general

Spracklen explores the impact of the internet on leisure and leisure studies, examining the ways in which digital leisure spaces and activities have become part of everyday leisure. Covering a range of issues from social media and file-sharing to romance on the Internet, this book presents new theoretical directions for digital leisure.

1

Introduction

I first came across the internet when I saw the famous web-cam set up by researchers in the Cambridge University computing department, which they used to keep an eye on the coffee percolator upstairs while they were working in another room. This was somewhere between 1990 and 1993 (my memory is hazy). I wasn’t particularly impressed but my friend Rhodri thought it was cool. He was our house’s technological enthusiast and we were all natural scientists, so it was no surprise that we were aware of what was going on in the ‘spod shop’ (the derogatory name applied to the computing building). But apart from that and some lectures on computing I missed in the first year, the internet had no real impact on my teaching and learning. I was still writing my essays by hand, reading library books and journal articles in hard-bound volumes that smelled of old paper and glue. I left Cambridge without ever seeing anything online or sending any email, though I knew people who were doing both of those things in their leisure time.

I went straight to Leeds Metropolitan University to study for my PhD in the autumn of 1993, after spending a summer thinking I was going to do a PhD at Warwick. I had applied by post, contacted the tutors by telephone and got my acceptance offer through the post. By 1994 (or thereabouts) we had internet access in the library, but it was slow and I didn’t use it at all. We did get email around 1995. Then in 1996 we were teaching students about the internet, which they could access all across the IT labs and in the library. It was round about this time that the internet had become the latest new technology to scare the tabloids and impress the broadsheets. I finished my PhD having never looked at a journal or book online: there are no references to websites anywhere in it (I have just searched for the word ‘internet’ in the Word version of my thesis and found no matches, even though the PhD is about the two codes of rugby and their imaginary communities). When I came back into teaching and researching leisure studies in 2004, surfing the internet was an everyday leisure activity, and the internet itself was an essential instrument of my work. When I lose my internet connection, or the university email server goes down, I feel completely lost and useless.

This research monograph will explore the growth and importance of the internet in shaping the meaning and purpose of leisure and popular culture. I will use the term ‘Net’ to capture not just the physical stuff of the internet, but the virtual and socio-cultural stuff as well. Journalists used to refer to the internet as the Net with capital letters because they were excited by its novelty and its importance, and it sounds and looks more ominous. I have adopted this usage as I think it is impossible to think about the internet and digital technology without thinking of all the other meanings and resonances surrounding them. Calling it all the Net becomes a useful form of shorthand, as well as a reminder of the strangeness of it. I will show that although we live in a digital age where identities and communities are seemingly in states of permanent transition, leisure remains caught between its communicative meaning for individuals, and its instrumental purpose for governments and global capitalism. This book will draw on the work of Jurgen Habermas, as my previous books have done (Spracklen, 2009, 2011a, 2013a), but it will also synthesize a new theory of digital leisure that draws on the work of Castells, Urry and Bauman and a host of others. It will review leisure theory about liquidity, networks and globalization before creating a theoretical framework that posits a return to a Habermasian account of popular culture. This will be in the first half of the book. In the second half, new research on digital leisure will be introduced to demonstrate the strength of the new theoretical framework.

Central to the theorization of digital leisure is the shift towards postmodernity, global networks and globalization. Globalization has been the focus of a number of key arguments in leisure studies, tourism studies and the sociology of sport. In the latter area, globalization lends itself to helping researchers understand the spread of modern, professional sports around the globe. The global reach of the Olympics and soccer is an obvious example of this trend. Richard Giulianotti (see, for example, Giulianotti and Robertson, 2007) has written extensively on the interaction and tension between the globalization of professional sports and the local ties and cultures of sports fandom. He sees sports such as soccer displaying what Robertson calls glocalization: the nexus of local and national loyalties associated with the local club and the national team being tested on a global stage, where elite athletes routinely travel thousands of miles from their countries of origin to play in the best domestic soccer leagues. Some sociologists of leisure such as Ken Roberts see no problem in accepting the impact of globalization on sports fandom. Roberts (2004) argues that globalization allows the strongest brands in professional sports to prosper and allows the best soccer teams, for example, to have more fans in cities thousands of miles away across the world than in their home country. Globalization is also viewed positively by historians and sociologists interested in the typically English game of cricket, which has been transformed globally by the professionalization of Australian and Indian cricket. The developments in India, in particular, with professional clubs and thousands of fans, cheerleaders and sponsors, have seen the global flows of economic and cultural migration associated with the British Empire reversed – the best English cricketers have taken huge salary increases to sign contracts with clubs in the Indian elite cricket league.

In tourism studies similar arguments have been put forward about the positive interaction between the local and the global. Theorists have argued that the technologies associated with globalization have reduced the size of the world and allow travellers and locals to meet each other as equals (Rojek and Urry, 1997). For example, the rise of the internet has reduced the power of travel agencies and transnational tourist companies and allowed tourists to book direct with hotels in countries on the opposite side of the world. Local businesses can cut out the fees they pay to travel agencies and get bookings directly. This is good for local economies in developing countries, where only a small share of the cost of a holiday booked through a transnational corporation trickles down. Locals can sell their local cultures directly to potential holiday-makers, too – and every region and city has its marketing teams working on websites telling potential visitors about the unique food, climate, landscape, shops, beaches and mountains that can be found there. Globalization also allows resorts and cities that have become unfashionable to find new markets from the growing economies of the East.

However, most theorists and researchers of leisure see globalization as a threat to diversity, and a tool of neo-colonialism. Post-Marxists such as John Horne (2006) argue that modern, professionalized sports and leisure forms are dominated by global capitalism and are vehicles for hegemonic power relationships. Bramham (2006) sees globalized leisure limiting free choices and destroying local pastimes: in a globalized world, everybody watches the same movies, the same sports, and everybody plays the same online games, paying our subscriptions and willingly signing away our ability to think. In the wake of the globalization of leisure, difference and diversity disappear – so traditional sports and games such as kabbadi in India are under threat from the development of American football in the country; and in China, local arts and cultural festivals are at risk of being lost or transformed into commercialized and marketized versions of their former selves. Leisure in globalization, according to Rojek (2010), is leisure that is denuded of its ability to allow people to find meaning: in a world that is globalizing, our choices are reduced and our leisure is increasingly dictated by the benefit-cost ratios of corporations and transnational free trade agreements.

The struggle over the use and meaning of the Net is clear evidence of the commodification of informal leisure habits. When the Net was formalized through the invention of the World Wide Web system in the early 1990s, most early adopters were urban, rich, educated and liberal. These early users saw the Net as a place of free discourse and communication, allowing them to bypass the systems of censorship, commodification and control associated with the entertainment and print industries (Briggs and Burke, 2009). Some early users even believed that the Net would transcend nation states to build a global, international community of free individuals, who would spend their time sharing ideas, spreading democracy and human rights, and creating a free space for artists, dreamers, philosophers and other utopians. This strong belief in the redeeming nature of the digital and the virtual as a free, uncensored site is still prevalent in discourse about the internet, and on the Net itself: Wikipedia, for example, would not exist without its creators giving their time and knowledge to edit the data. However, since the 1990s the Net has become commodified, populated by multinational corporations wishing to sell to us directly (Amazon) or to turn our personal data into a commodity to sell to others (Facebook, Google). Our informal, private digital use is turned into browsing habits and preferences that are bought and sold by marketing companies. Our time on the Net is increasingly used to buy things. There are still millions of websites that give users free material, but even that transaction is one of commodity, buying something for nothing rather than interacting and contributing.

Manuel Castells’ (1996) The Rise of the Network Society has become a classic text of social theory, charting the rise of the information age and the end of the old modernist social structures. In this book, the first of his The Information Age trilogy, Castells argues that the technological advances associated with the Net have disrupted traditional social structures, economics and politics. In this information age, the Net changes the way we consume popular culture, for example. We no longer listen to music on the radio or television and go out to buy it on the high street – instead we browse file-sharing sites and swap recommendations with others. The Net has made all culture popular, and has bypassed traditional arbiters of taste such as professional critics and corporations – there is an anarchic democracy of free choice. However, Castells does not believe that this makes the Net an individualist utopia, a paradise of downloading and sharing. Rather, the Net has become an apparatus of commerce, control and surveillance, with most of this activity hidden behind the discourse of personal freedom. The new corporations work alongside governments to balance the pursuit of profit with the need to limit political action. Popular culture on the internet is increasingly marketized, with every transaction noted and tracked by algorithms so the gatekeeping sites on the Net can target adverts at us more effectively. At the same time, governments are keen to access personal data most of us have placed on social networking sites. We can witness some of these trends in the examples of MySpace and gold farming.

For a number of years in the first decade of the twenty-first century, Myspace.com played a significant role in the construction of modern subcultures. The business models of the pop music industry assumed young people were passive consumers who could be sold one artist after another in a charts system controlled by marketing teams. Big labels made big profits while the labels controlled the supply of information about bands and the availability of music in record stores. All this changed with the creation of MySpace.com, combined with the advance in technology that led to the rise in music-file downloading (legally and illegally) as an informal leisure activity. Bands could now market themselves directly to potential fans without the need for managers or labels; they could sell their music; and fans could find bands they liked through following hyperlinks from one band’s page to another band’s page. MySpace.com became something that shaped modern pop music subcultures, making underground and extreme music genres and artists freely available and easily accessible to a global audience (Wilkinson and Thelwall, 2010). Some pop music subcultures were invented through MySpace.com’s friend connections (such as deathcore in heavy metal, based on the hype of counting thousands of friends). Myspace.com was bought by a transnational corporation seeking to profit from the hype. The pop music industry saw MySpace.com as something to be exploited, playing with hyping and friend-making to try to build fan bases for bands, using online fan networks as they used real-world street teams to hype acts through word-of-mouth. Subcultures drifted away from using MySpace.com as soon as this started to happen.

Online gaming systems such as World of Warcraft require hundreds of hours of player time to develop characters. One starts these games with basic characters with little money, basic weapons or spells, and poorly developed skills. It is your initial task to build up your character’s profile so that you have enough virtual resources and power to take part in entertaining and immersive multi-character quests. To get to this point means engaging in lots of fights or trivial challenges, taking hours of gameplay. For many online gamers, this is part of the discipline required to be a part of these virtual worlds, and for some there is satisfaction and thrill to be found in killing creature after creature at two o’clock in the morning. But for others there is the option of buying the time of a worker (a ‘gold farmer’) elsewhere in the world, who will develop a character up to a more interesting and survivable level. Such factories of online character development have emerged to meet the needs of the rich, time-poor gamers of the developed world and are often based in developing countries in Asia. As well as the general task of development, these workers will also do bespoke work, finding particular magic items, for example, which are sorely needed by individual gamers in the developed West. In a world driven by capitalism, it is perfectly acceptable to create these markets – there is a demand from the rich and a supply of gaming talent in developing countries who can meet the needs of the rich Westerners.

About this book

This monograph is an original, new and innovative contribution to leisure theory, internet studies and cultural theory. I will argue that digital leisure, while obviously a novel phenomenon and a novel space, is not something so novel that the structures that govern our world break down before it.

Chapter 2, ‘A Brief History of Leisure and the Net’, sets out the history and development of the internet as a leisure space. The first section is a relatively brief social and technological history of the Net. The second section of the chapter explores the concept of virtuality and the Net in popular culture from the 1950s to the 1970s. The third section of the chapter examines the growth of bulletin boards in the 1980s and the emergence of the Net as a fully established leisure space. The fourth section of the chapter discusses the World Wide Web and its rapid adoption across rich, Westernized areas of the globe. It will be argued that the leisure possibilities of the Net are limited by the unequal distribution of resources and increasing State control of points of access.

Chapter 3, ‘Leisure Studies and the Problem of the Net’, is an overview of research and theories about the Net in the subject field of leisure studies – a literature review. It will be shown that researchers within leisure studies who have studied the Net have largely adopted the utopian claims of the founders of the Net, and have used postmodern and post-structural understandings of identity and belonging to argue that the Net is a liberatory leisure space. I will suggest that the claims made for the liquid or utopian nature of leisure on the Net is poorly evidenced and is a matter of rhetoric rather than critical analysis. The first section will explore research papers published in the leisure literature that have the Net as an object of study, either as a primary focus of research or a secondary source of research findings and analysis. The second section of the chapter will concentrate on mapping the internet in the works of key leisure theorists who have tried to make sense of the emergence of the Net: Blackshaw, Rojek, Roberts, Stebbins, Aitchison, Giulianotti and Crouch.

Chapter 4, ‘Net Theory and Digital Leisure’, focuses on the work of key theorists outside leisure studies who have attempted to understand and critique the development of the Network Society. The first section will discuss the work of Baudrillard, Turkle, Urry, Bauman, Giddens and Delanty. I will argue that the Net is used by each of these theorists as both a metaphor for postmodernity, an agent in the construction and limitation of our social selves, and as proof of the growth of global networks and mobilities. The second section will concentrate on the writings of Castells and his theory of the Network Society. I will argue that Castells was prescient not only about the emancipatory possibilities offered by the Net, but also the hegemonic struggles that would shape the leisure space. The final section of the chapter will explore the Net in the later writings of Habermas to show how his analysis of the Net is tied to his idea of the lifeworld.

Chapter 5, ‘A Theory of Digital Leisure’, develops a new theory of digital leisure, using Habermas’ theoretical framework of communicative and instrumental rationality, along with ideas from Castells, Urry and Bauman. I will argue that for the users of the Net, digital leisure appears to be seamlessly communicative and liberating. Users are given the appearance of being liquid surfers, shifting their focus at the click of a mouse, sharing ideas and cultural interests with people in the global networks. However, the Net itself is a technology that is in reality a form of instrumental leisure and commodification, based on economic transactions, control and surveillance, and unequal power relations. In this respect, digital leisure is like any other leisure form. But the effect the Net has on challenging hegemonies, as well as its unique interactivity and its speed, makes digital leisure more communicative than sports or traditional forms of popular culture.

The next five chapters use a combination of original, primary research by the author, and secondary material from other published research papers. Statistics on users and content will be collated from professional monitoring sites. The original research will be a combination of semiotic analysis of sites, content analysis of sites, discourse tracing on online discussions and some semi-structured interviews with internet users.

Chapter 6, ‘Identity-Making and Social Media’, explores the emergence and importance of social media and networks in everyday leisure time and leisure practices. I will look at the ways in which social networks are used to build a sense of community and belonging, and the ways in which social networks serve as Goffmanesque public spaces in which people perform acceptable social identities. I will trace how the Net has become a social network and communicative leisure space in more general terms away from the branded and commodified sites such as Facebook. I will show that fans of sports, music and other forms of popular culture can use the Net to discuss their private obsessions with other fans. But I will show that the Net can also be a place where social activism can be supported, where politics can move from the online to the offline to build effective protests and campaigns. While this development is a boon to radical activists on the left, it is also something that can be and is utilized by activists on the far right. Hence the communicative freedom of the Net, as I will show, is prone to producing climate-change deniers as much as anti-fascists.

Chapter 7, ‘File-Sharing and Net Ethics’, examines the practice of downloading music and film files. The chapter will begin with an overview of the sociology and anthropology of file-sharing and its pre-internet equivalents. I will explore the practices around and the commercialization of YouTube. I will explore the ways in which corporations and governments have reacted to illegal downloading through the construction of commercial downloading sites and transnational agreements and legislation on illegal downloading. I will explore Net users’ attitudes to downloading through an analysis of blogs, forum sites and in interviews. I wi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1. Introduction
• 2. A Brief History of Leisure and the Net
• 3. Leisure Studies and the Problem of the Net
• 4. Net Theory and Digital Leisure
• 5. A Theory of Digital Leisure
• 6. Identity-Making and Social Media
• 7. File-Sharing and Net Ethics
• 8. Digital Leisure and Commodification
• 9. Digital Leisure and Communicative Leisure
• 10. Sex and Romance
• 11. Conclusions
• References
• Index