How digital cultures carve their own online spaces through practices - Part 1

This is an essay-turned-blog-post. The division of parts is according to the sectioning in the original essay structure and format.

Digital cultures are inherent to the Internet, through which they afford a particular experience of connecting and existing online. With the ubiquity of technology and social media in our lives, our hobbies and interests can easily bleed into our online practices and situate us in specific virtual spaces. As the online environment can be exclusive through human biases amplified by technology, digital cultures can act as not only “safe spaces” for users, but can also provide empowerment and a sense of belonging. Yet, this can also result in extremist communities online. This topic is relevant due to the sheer variety and number of online communities that shape the digital culture overall. Through interconnectedness, every Internet user participates in digital cultures to varying degrees. My own Internet experience has been mostly tied to varying online communities over the years, and I had many opportunities to observe digital communities engaging in both over-arching practices characteristic of digital cultures in general, and in practices that are specific to subcultures. These practices can be artifact-producing and can shape how culture is consumed and witnessed. Yet it is essential to ask, what is (digital) culture? And what academic concepts make up this notion? In this theoretical piece, I aim to summarize, synthesize, and critique digital cultures and their practices through which they assert and establish their own online space. To achieve this I look at two perspectives that could paint a picture of what is digital culture.

The first possible thought, when one mentions “digital cultures”, might be fandoms. Though fandoms, as such, predate the Internet, the online is where they are afforded growth to the arguably fullest potential possible in this day and age. Connecting with like-minded individuals, and sharing opinions, art, feelings, and the like with the particular community, can result in a sense of belonging. This sense could arguably be why communities aim to sustain their place online, even if unconsciously. But by engaging in practices, as mentioned above, digital cultures assert and establish their own online space. From the fandom perspective, I analyze Chang and Tian’s (2021) text on Chinese online female counterculture in the form of Yaoi and Kim’s (2009) article on women’s games in Japan to showcase how digital feminism is practiced through women’s hobbies that at the same time subvert gender roles, sustaining significantly large online “security zones” for women. Where fans engage in practices stemming from the love and excitement for a digital object or personas, there are practices stemming from fandoms that venture further into politics. Komporozos-Athanasiou’s (2022) chapter on counter-speculations showcases various practices that result in physical political impact. The author also highlights the financialization of almost every aspect of our lives. De Kosnik (2013) interrogates the practice of “free” fan labor that puts financialization back into the fandom perspective. The last article analyzed from this point of view is by Reinhard et al. (2022). They explore the QAnon conspiracy by framing it as a fandom, due to the fact, that as in fandoms, QAnon believers have an “object of affection” due to which they associate and congregate as a community, or more specifically, as a fandom. But this community has a record of violent activities, headcanons, and fanons that are based on discriminating and harming, in the end, anyone who is not a wealthy, white, cisgender, and heterosexual man.

The fandom perspective, though it brings a vast number of insights on what digital culture is or can be, is based on an “object of affection” (Reinhard et al. 2022), or goal(s) the community wants to achieve (Komporozos-Athanasiou 2022; Reinhard et al. 2022). But there are digital cultures that do not have either across the whole community. In other words, the members and smaller sections of the digital culture may have personal/communal objects of affection or personal/communal goals, but those are not universal throughout the entire community. In the section after the fandom perspective, I focus on and analyze a chapter by Brock (2020) on how Black people carve out their space on Twitter (now called X) through practices and how they assert their place online by transforming their digital culture into “Black Technoculture”. Towns (2020) ventures into the importance of Black culture in media philosophy, critiquing how Black people have been considered only as a measure for white scholars and media to understand “how far they are in technological evolution and understanding” compared to them. Which completely ignores and dehumanizes the Black population. Towns positions Black media philosophy as the new academic flow instead of, yet inspired by, McLuhan and his concepts. Towns moves McLuhan’s concepts from technological determinism and artifacts more into the center of Lievrouw’s schema of mediation, hence considering arrangements and practices as a little more equalized to artifacts (Lievrouw 2014).

References

Brock, André L. 2020. Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures. Critical Cultural Communication. New York: University Press.

Chang, Jiang, and Hao Tian. 2021. “Girl Power in Boy Love: Yaoi, Online Female Counterculture, and Digital Feminism in China.” Feminist Media Studies 21 (4): 604–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2020.1803942.

De Kosnik, Abigail. 2013. “Interrogating ‘Free’ Fan Labor | Spreadable Media.” 2013. http://spreadablemedia.org/essays/kosnik/index.html.

Kim, Hyeshin. 2009. “Women’s Games in Japan: Gendered Identity and Narrative Construction.” Theory, Culture & Society 26 (2–3): 165–88. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276409103132.

Komporozos-Athanasiou, Aris. 2022. Speculative Communities: Living with Uncertainty in a Financialized World. Chicago ; The University of Chicago Press.

Lievrouw, Leah A. 2014. “Materiality and Media in Communication and Technology Studies: An Unfinished Project.” In Media Technologies. Inside Technology. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262525374.003.0002.

Reinhard, CarrieLynn D., David Stanley, and Linda Howell. 2022. “Fans of Q: The Stakes of QAnon’s Functioning as Political Fandom.” The American Behavioral Scientist (Beverly Hills) 66 (8): 1152–72. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642211042294.

Towns, Armond R. 2020. “Toward a Black Media Philosophy.” Cultural Studies (London, England) 34 (6): 851–73. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2020.1792524.