Digital Countercultures and the Struggle for Community

Jessa Lingel, Laura DeNardis, Michael Zimmer

• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9780262340168
• Subtopic: Digital Marketing
• Index: Business

Whether by accidental keystroke or deliberate tinkering, technology is often used in ways that are unintended and unimagined by its designers and inventors. In this book, 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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Frameworks for Technology and Communities of Alterity
• 3 The Death and Life of Great Online Subcultures: An Analysis of Body Modification Ezine
• 4 They Came from the Basement: Tactics of Secrecy in New Brunswick’s Underground Punk Community
• 5 Fight for Your Platform to Party: Brooklyn Drag and the Battle for a Queerer Facebook
• 6 Countercultural Values for Theory and in Design
• Appendix: Methodological Notes
• References
• Index