Digital Countercultures and the Struggle for Community

by Jessa Lingel

How countercultural communities have made the Internet meet their needs, subverting established norms of digital technology use. 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.

Genres: Nonfiction

192 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2017

Reviews

[Christophe Bruchansky · Rating 5 out of 5]

In its introduction, "Digital Countercultures and the Struggle for Community" challenges commonly held assumptions about online technologies: that they related to disembodiment, that the Internet is a platform for authenticity and experimentation, and that web-based interactions are placeless.

Based on concepts developed Michel de Certeau, the author describes three criteria to assess tactics developed by countercultural communities to maintain identity “within the strategic infrastructures of dominant social media platforms”: legibility, flexibility and authenticity.

The author concludes by providing some ideas on how to foster (or preserve) countercultural communities online:
- Not always prioritise mobility over sense of place.
- Recognize the importance of pseudonyms and anonyms in the building of some communities.
- Keep social media platforms diverse even if it means some are bulkier or less sophisticated.
- Involve users in the design of their social media platforms.
- Think of user guidelines as a living document that matters in everyday online life.
- Encourage social media designers to think in terms not only of personas (individuals) but also communities.

Relating to the approach used by our think tank to promote pluralism (the digressive approach), I wonder to what extend these ideas should be implemented by dominant social media platforms in order to preserve a certain degree of dissonance on their platform (conciliatory approach), or if they should be implemented by cultural agents wishing to provide alternatives to dominant social media platforms (competitive approach).

In my view, it would have been interesting to challenge a bit more the status of mainstream social platforms. From this book, I have the impression that de Certeau’s framework can only work if we assume that a set of norms is dominating society: countercultural communities would have to remain marginal in order to preserve their identity, and could never lead to a truly multicultural society. Is this scenario excluded?

Overall, however, I’ve found the concepts of tactics, strategies, legibility, flexibility, and authenticity useful to articulate the struggle of some communities to “retain a sense of identity and alterity amid hegemonic cultural institutions”.

[Carrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting and something I want to share with my socialj students. Important insights into different types of communities and how they behave and what they need online.

[Kacper · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's a bit of a misleading title. It says "digital countercultures" but only 3 countercultures are profiled here.

[Erkan Saka · Rating 2 out of 5]

This really is about countercultures- some case studies. Not really digital countercultures.