Subcultures and the Internet

Last Wednesday, in my Myth and Legend class, I gave an extremely well-thought-out, well-prepared presentation on the mythical perspective of Subcultures, and how the internet is changing them.

It was an interesting class; we didn't take the approach I thought we were going to take on the subject matter, but I wont even attempt to explain everything we did talk about (though, if you're interested, practically everything we did came out of this Bill Moyers interview with Joseph Campbell), because there's so much. The goal of our finals presentations was to find some sort of 'modern myth' - not 'myth' as in an untrue thing we all believe in, but 'myth' as in the way we align ourselves with the world at large.

Joseph Campbell

The obvious choice to me seemed to be the internet. It's huge, it's vast, no one quite understands it, and we all believe in it and take part of it anyways. I narrowed my topic down to Subcultures, as a way to approach this vast idea of 'the internet', and then did a bunch of research to decide what exactly I was going to hit upon during my allotted 10-20 minutes.

When it came to making the visuals for my presentation, I decided, instead of making a PowerPoint presentation and hoping the school computer would read it correctly, to make a Google Docs file. I was introduced to Google Docs only a month or so ago, when a brother announced he was getting married. Google Docs lets you create Microsoft-esque files online, like word documents, or in my case powerpoint presentations, so you can access the file form any computer. I felt this was only fitting, with my chosen topic.

Here is a link to my final Google Docs presentation. I don't have a transcript of everything I said that day (and honestly, why would I?), but I'll go over basically everything I said, and you can follow along with the visual presentation.

The first slide is my title slide - I edited it so my pseudonym appears now instead of my real name, below my presentation title.

On the second slide, I briefly went over what I'd be talking about; explaining what subcultures are, what the modern internet has done and is doing to change things, and how it's all mythical. I also included a quote by Joseph Campbell, the expert in comparative mythology whose book we read this semester. Somewhere in the book (I couldn't find the exact page), Campbell says "We need myths that will identify the individual not with his local group but with the planet." I was fascinated that he'd say this in the late 80s when he died, just before the internet started to fulfill the very need he saw us as having.

I then went over Subcultures, as we used to think of them, on the third slide. In case you aren't aware, a subculture is a group of people in a society, who have their own beliefs or customs that differ from the larger culture. For an example, I presented America and Americans as the larger culture; subcultures within include 'emo', skaters, ravers, and hip-hop.

I also noted that the examples I used are primarily high school and young adult stereotypes. As people grow older, these types of subcultures tend to disappear, and the subcultures that take their place are more hobby and vocational-based. There's a definite subculture of people who work in the fashion industry, office-workers, policemen, teachers, and so on, as well as people who make model trains or go to Star Trek conventions and such.

The reason, I posited, that these subcultures form primarily in young adults in the need to 'fit in'. Young people are still trying to develop their self identity, and joining a smaller group make much more sense then trying to identify with a large, abstract group with millions of members, like 'Americans'. Unfortunately, this leads to a lot of conformity; people with a need to fit into a group will sacrifice their own opinions if the group doesn't share those opinions

On my fourth slide, I switched gears for a moment to explain some history on the internet. The internet as we know it today has been in production as long as computers have - The World Wide Web Project, however, didn't start until '91, and it wasn't until the mid-1990s that the idea of the internet started to become popular to the general public. I thought this was interesting - Campbell died in 1989, and only a few years after his death, the internet started to grow, almost in reply to his belief that the modern myth needed to "identify the individual... with the planet."

The internet is also a really abstract idea. When we think about 'the internet', we imagine one thing existing somewhere that our computer is accessing, but in reality there are hundreds of thousands of computers and servers hosting information and sending bits of that information through even more computers and servers so that we can see a single web page. This all happens in about a second, depending on how fast our browser is.

To illustrate this idea, I pulled up the next part of the slide - a graphical representation of all Internet Protocol addresses and the connections between them. The picture was developed by a team known as the Opte Project, who have made multiple attempts to graphically represent the internet. Each dot in the picture - so small, they're not actually visible - represents an Internet Protocol address, and each line represents a direct connection between two Internet Protocol 'locations'.

(I didn't mention this is my presentation, but doesn't this look very familiar?)

This, I believed, was still a bit confusing, so I pulled up the next image:

The minuscule dot that the arrow is attempting to point at is your IP address, or your computer. The green cluster to the right, let's say, is Facebook. Your computer sends a ping to the servers it's directly connected to until that ping reaches Facebook, which decodes your IP location, and sends you the correct information back.

This is vastly simplified.

But it's also still a bit too abstract, so to simplify it even more, I moved on to the next slide. The picture on slide five is an artistic representation of online communities, created by the guy who draws one of my favorite webcomics, XKCD. He created it by charting how often certain web servers got different pings; websites that got more pings were drawn as larger 'countries', and so forth. I spent a minute or so navigating the map for my classmates to see, then started talking about the forums.

The forums on this map are a small island cluster to the right of the center (with an insert below), where people go to talk about whatever they want to talk about. There are forums dedicated to certain movies or books, to different types of games, or anything else you can imagine. Essentially, every forum is it's own subculture. The people in a particular forum have their own shared interests and beliefs, and this isn't limited to just our forums. There are also blog-based subcultures, and multiple subcultures on Youtube or Facebook.

What's different about these internet-based subcultures, however, is that the individual chooses where to 'go'. In a location-based group, everyone's limited to the other around them, and if they want to 'fit in', they have to fit in with the people they're immediately in contact with. With an internet subculture, if someone has a personal belief that differs from the group, they can go somewhere else and join another subculture to reinforce their own opinion. Subcultures on the internet are much more individual-based then subcultures in the past.

This all reminded me of a subject that Campbell talks about in the book we read this semester (for those of you still following along with my presentation, there are two more pictures on this slide). Among ancient tribes people, two different types of myths formed: the hunter mythologies and the agricultural mythologies. The gods and goddesses of agricultural societies acted differently than the gods and goddess of hunter societies, even though they had similar structures, and they had different types of creation stories and afterlifes. Today, our different cultures coexist with different types of beliefs, just like they did long ago (of course, we're much less likely to try to kill each other on sight nowadays).

On my sixth slide, I went over a handful of subcultures that couldn't exist without the internet. There's Facebook, which is almost large enough to be considered a primary culture (there are already many subcultures from Facebook). There's Wikipedia - and I'm not just talking about the use of Wikipedia. There's a large subculture of people who spend a significant amount of time doing research and updating Wikipedia to be as accurate as possible, just for the joy of it. This subculture works so hard, Wikipedia is now considered just as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica.

There's also the Twitter subculture, the Livejournal subculture, and those who follow I Can haz Cheezburger. There's 4Chan, Anonymous, Minecraft, World of Warcraft, Farmville, there's everyone who follows or makes Let's Play videos, everyone who fansubs or watches Jdrama or Kdrama, everyone who writes or reads blogs in the blogosphere, and everyone who uploads or downloads from Peer-2-Peer filesharing sites - and these are just the ones I know about.

[Quick quiz - guess which four subcultures I'm a part of, and which I used to be an avid member of just a year ago.]

Yes, Facebook counts.

Each subculture was created by a group of people sitting down together, via the internet, with a common interest. Each has their own rites, customs, and rituals, as all the old mythologies did, and each helps to connect individuals today with the worlds at large.

On my final slide, I started with the proverb "You can't see the forest for the trees," which basically means that it's harder to understand a situation while you're inside of it. People nowadays are on the internet all the time, so it's hard to understand how the internet is becoming a sort of global mythology. People are also lamenting the internet, saying it's doing more harm than good, but I'd have to disagree with that. We're still in the new stages, trying to figure out what we should be doing with this technology. Anytime something is new, people have a tendency to pull back from it, afraid of its different-ness.

The internet is not done. We're still settling in with it, testing boundaries and abilities. I love this quote by Campbell, however, on page 41 of his book: "[T]he only myth that is going to be worth thinking about in the immediate future is one that is talking about the planet, not the city, not these people, but the planet, and everybody on it." The internet is definitely talking about the planet. Thirty years ago, a major political revolution in Egypt would have headlining news. Now, it's something we're a part of, talking directly with the people there. I've replied to more than one comment online only to realize later that the person I was talking to didn't live in the same country as me. We're now starting to talk about the entire planet, not just our local groups.