Research Catalog

Digital countercultures and the struggle for community

Title
Digital countercultures and the struggle for community / Jessa Lingel.
Author
Lingel, Jessa (Jessica), 1983-
Publication
Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, [2017]

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StatusFormatAccessCall NumberItem Location
Book/TextUse in library JFE 17-5206Schwarzman Building - Milstein Division Room 121

Details

Description
viii, 178 pages : illustrations, map; 24 cm
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.
Series Statement
The information society series
Uniform Title
Information society series.
Alternative Title
Digital countercultures
Subject
  • Internet > Social aspects > United States
  • Internet users > United States
  • Subculture > United States
  • Social interaction > United States
  • Digital media > United States
  • Digital media
  • Internet > Social aspects
  • Internet users
  • Social interaction
  • Subculture
  • Neue Medien
  • Protest
  • Gemeinschaft
  • United States
Bibliography (note)
  • Includes bibliographical references and index.
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.
Call Number
JFE 17-5206
ISBN
  • 9780262036214
  • 0262036215
LCCN
2016037856
OCLC
958796566
Author
Lingel, Jessa (Jessica), 1983-
Title
Digital countercultures and the struggle for community / Jessa Lingel.
Publisher
Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, [2017]
Type of Content
text
Type of Medium
unmediated
Type of Carrier
volume
Series
The information society series
Information society series.
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Spine Title
Digital countercultures
Research Call Number
JFE 17-5206
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