A student of mine wants to read 5 key communication books. I have a list, but what would you suggest? (#nocanonwars) @ScottTimcke

My colleague and friend, Scott Timcke, recently posed a challenge on twitter to list five “key books” in communication studies. This can’t be a “best of” list, though, as the field of communication is too broad and/or balkanized for any five books to be key–or even relevant–to all, most, or many of us. I started out trying to think of “foundational” texts but abandoned that tack when my mind kept turning to books I’d never actually read in their entirety (sorry, George Herbert Mead). So, what follows is an idiosyncratic list of five books that have really influenced how I think about media, communication, and cultural studies.

• John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)

• Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, [1958] 1983)

• Mark Kingwell, A Civil Tongue: Justice, Dialogue, and the Politics of Pluralism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995)

• Russell Keat, Cultural Goods and the Limits of the Market (Houndsmills, Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 2000)

• Nick Couldry, Listening Beyond the Echoes: Media, Ethics, and Agency in an Uncertain World (Boulder, CO: Paradigm)

What are five great books in your field? Post them on twitter with the hashtag #nocanonwars.

Update: When I went to post this to twitter, I came up with this syntax for putting up your five:

What are five great books in your field or specialism? Tweet them like #My5books ($area): book_1, book_2, … book_5 #nocanonwars @wooesque

Hand of Fire is not a biography of Kirby, nor is it exactly a critical appreciation (for those, see the books appendix), as Hatfield focuses on a narrow slice of Kirby’s oeuvre (of the six “periods” of his career (21–33), only two are discussed in significant detail). Instead, Hatfield asks us to consider a smaller sampling of examples in light of a couple of main points.

The book’s major argument and contribution is Hatfield’s concept of comics art as “narrative drawing.” Writers have arguably driven the recent transformation and consecration of the “American” comic book cum graphic novel as art form. Hatfield develops a more complex idea of authorship, one which recognizes the contribution of visual artist to the finished work:

Cartooning, as I define it, is emphatically not the same as illustrating a prior text; Kirby generated stories through drawing. His stories and characters were affordances to his graphic sense; vice versa, his graphics were inspired by imagined narratives.

Comic-book artists are not merely “illustrators”; they decisively shape the “text” and, consequently, the reader’s experience.

In the “Marvel method” of production, developed in Stan Lee’s collaborations with Kirby and Steve Ditko, artists worked from a story outline but made all of the decisions about breaking down, pacing, and laying out that story themselves, and the writer later returned to add captions and dialogue. Over time, Kirby was given ever freer reign by Stan Lee, who was increasingly disinterested in day-to-day editorial oversight, and became more and more responsible for what actually ended up on the page. According to Hatfield, Lee was a unifying presence without whom Marvel Comics as we know it would not exist, but Kirby should be seen as the primary author of the Marvel universe.

Kirby serves as an extreme case for this line of argument. Despite being celebrated as the “King of Comics” and his unmistakeable style, Kirby was–as Hatfield takes pains to remind us–the quintessential work-for-hire cartoonist. Over his forty-year career in comics, he produced an estimated 21,000 pages of comic art (7), and while on contract to DC in the 1970s was required to draw 15 pages a week (176). Yet, in the midst of this prodigious workload, Kirby improvised characters, concepts, and stories that are still inspiring readers and creators today–and still generating revenue for DC and Marvel (and their respective corporate owners, Warner Bros. and Disney). Borrowing from Bourdieu, Hatfield argues that Kirby managed to carve out a sphere of “relative autonomy” within a very heteronomous form of mass-media production.

The first four chapters develop this argument about authorship through Kirby’s working methods and career. Afterwards, the book loses some of its structural coherence. A chapter on the “technological sublime” in Kirby’s work, two on the Fourth World saga, and one on Kirby’s return to a very different Marvel Comics in the ‘70s follow. They’re interesting and important contributions in their own right, but also could conceivably have worked as standalone essays. The book’s real strength is the first part and the way Hatfield uses Jack Kirby and his wonderful, crazy art to redefine what it means to be a “Great Comics Artist.”

Meanwhile, I’ve written a guest post for the Comics Forum blog called “Beyond Our Borders: Mapping the Space of Comics.” Comics Forum is an academic conference under the directorship of Ian Hague and attached to the Thought Bubble Festival in Leeds. I met Ian when I was in England this summer, and he invited me to write something up for the blog, which is a great space for scholars and fans to talk to one another.

Although I’m grousing, I had a great trip. Both conferences I attended were extremely interesting in themselves, and it was particularly delightful to dip my toe into another scholarly community.

***

As previously mentioned, I started off at the Joint International Conference of Graphic Novels, Bandes dessinées and Comics, which was jointly sponsored by the journals, Studies in Comics, European Comic Art, and the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. There were two major themes for the conference, space & time and audiences & readership. I spent most of time in the latter stream of panels, and given the formalist and humanistic tenor of most comics studies, it was a breath of fresh air.

It was particularly nice to see some empirical research on comics readers, such as Liam Burke’s survey of Thor and Green Lantern movie audiences, which found that half of those who identified as comic fans don’t actually read comics while 10% of people who identify as non-fans do, and Shari Sabeti’s work with an extracurricular graphic novel–reading club in a Scottish secondary school. Very interesting secondary analyses of data—for example, of press and citizen reviews of Joe Sacco’s Palestine (Martin Barker), of letters to the editor of Superman (Ian Gordon), or of previous interview studies of comics fans (Simon Locke)—were also presented. I think social-scientific approaches to comics and concern with the real people involved at either end of the industry still has a long way to go, but it’s clear that there is some very interesting work being done in this area that will challenge a lot of the assumptions that we have extracted from isolated readings of texts or ported over from the lore of fandom.

Excepting a lack of delegate wi-fi access, a kooky kabbalistic keynote, and a terrible beeping noise outside my dorm room, I think the conference (or, rather, its first half: I couldn’t stay for the meeting of the International Bande dessinée Society in the second half) came off rather well.

An expanded version of my paper, “The Android’s Dungeon,” will be published this December in a special issue of the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics on the theme of audiences and readership.

***

From Manchester, I took a short train ride to Leeds to the Moral Economies of Creative Labour conference, organized by members of the Leeds University Institute of Communication Studies and the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change.

The conference brought together the kind of social/cultural theory I’m used to seeing in communication studies with perspectives from political and moral philosophy, which is much less common, to talk about creative work and the cultural industries. There was also a strong empirical core to many of the papers I saw.

One interesting theme to emerge was the role of universities in shaping the place of creative labour in our societies.

On the one hand, unpaid work placements and internships were an important issue for several presenters. Sabina Siebert, for example, noted that it was becoming common for aspiring journalists to devote as much as 18 months of unpaid labour to media companies, and fewer then half of them get a job out of it at the end. David Hesmondhalgh drew attention to universities’ complicity in organizing the market for unpaid work through co-op schemes.

On the other hand, academic labour was frequently referenced during question and discussion periods as presenters sought illustrations of their arguments about knowledge work in general. I wonder if this hard-nosed look at creative and cultural labour is only possible now that our own positions as academics have been suitably professionalized, “precariatized,” and demystified.

I was on a panel more closely focussed on Alasdair MacIntyre’s theory of practices and its application to cultural work. Mark Banks opened, discussing the relative merits of MacIntyrean and Bourdieusian interpretations of jazz musicians’ descriptions of their practice. I talked about audience practices as a normative foundation for cultural policy. Finally, Luke Jaaniste reflected on the competing demands of “practice” and “institution” on cultural practitioners.

I was particularly thrilled to see the keynote by Russell Keat, who is an emeritus professor at Edinburgh and whose book, Cultural Goods and the Limits of the Market, has been really important to me in the last couple years. Andrew Sayer’s closing keynote, which discussed at the idea of “contributive justice” and the division of good and bad work amongst workers and jobs, was also a highlight.

My talk is up at Scribd, and the slides can be viewed at SlideShare.

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.
(Romeo and Juliet II.2, 45–46)

One of the things that’s been really fun about my recent interviews has been talking with people about how they use words like nerd, geek, and fan. Despite my own (admittedly nerdish) tendencies towards superstandard English and linguistic prescriptivism, as someone trying to put together a picture of contemporary nerd culture, I have to be open to how these words are used in practice to classify the social world. In truth, the point is not to develop ironclad definitions of them but, by asking people to reflect on how they use these labels (among others), I’m hoping to bring to the surface the kinds of reasoning that go in to defining the boundaries of geek culture.

via Great White Snark

I’m still in the early stages of this research, but I’ve observed two distinct ways of defining the meanings of these labels: (1) content and (2) intensity. That is to say, it matters both what you’re interested in and how you go about pursuing that interest.

For some of my interviewees, either (1) or (2) is more properly attached to either nerd or geek. For others, both dimensions are part of your geek cred, whatever words you choose to use. These definitional strategies don’t always produce neat and tidy results, leading some interviewees, for example, to aver that nerds are those who are obsessed with something, where that something could be anything, while geeks have an enthusiastic but more normal interest in nerdy subjects like science-fiction, comic books, and games. Or again, one could be a fan of anything but only belongs to fandom if the thing of which you are a fan is properly fannish. And, of course, not all fandoms are necessarily part of geek culture: No matter how much you may geek out about it, if it isn’t nerdy then you aren’t a geek.

I’m thinking more of these definitional issues thanks to Brett Schenker’s new column at Graphic Policy where he’s datamining Facebook for information about comic fans. In his first post, he described the age, gender composition, levels of educational attainment, relationship status, and “gender interest” of comic fans on Facebook. In the second, he’s returned to the same statistics, but has somewhat altered his criteria for selecting his data set.

Inclusion is based on the “likes” people are themselves listing on Facebook, and this seems like a really great way to sidestep the problems of the researcher having to decide who’s in and who’s out. The first post is based on American Facebook users who indicate that they like one of nine identifiers. Says Schenker, “Going above this nine added to the universe, but not to the point that it mattered much.  In my eyes, this nine were some of the top identifiers covering fans of mainstream comics and indie comics.”

In the second post, the number of identifiers has been increased to 28, although that has not jumped the size of the data set up by very much. Schenker doesn’t list what his identifiers are but explains his thinking in choosing them: “they are general comic book companies/publishers/lines and what I’ll call the ‘medium,’ so manga, comic books, graphic novels, etc.  I stayed away from individual books and personalities as well as related comic book tie-ins like movies, video games and toys.”

This reflects to a certain degree something I’ve seen in my interviews with people who describe themselves of fans. The term is more easily applied to the works of an author or a (sub)genre—i.e., “I’m a fan of Stephen Hunt,” or, “I’m a fan of steampunk.” Applying the term to an individual work is a bit trickier, unless that work has become something of a cultural phenomenon with a significantly large base of readers to sustain interest in it over time. One might be a fan of Tolkien, High Fantasy, or The Lord of the Rings, but one is probably not going to call oneself a fan of Generic High Fantasy Tolkien Rip-Off Novel, even if you really like it.

What this suggests to me is that we have to be very careful in how we deploy the word fan. There certainly was a time when it seemed that comics were a niche enough interest that, well, to know them was to love them. Is this still the case? I’m not entirely sure. But we should be clear that comic fans and the audience for comic books are not identical terms. In excluding people who identify themselves as liking individual works or as fans of creators, we‘re privileging a certain way of engaging with comics (definitional strategy [2]) over engagement simpliciter (definition strategy [1]).

First up is the Joint International Conference for Graphic Novels, Bandes dessinées, and Comics at Manchester Metropolitan University, July 5–6. I’ll be presenting in the “audiences and readership” concentration. My paper is called “The Android’s Dungeon: Comic-Book Stores as Social Settings” and draws on some of my fieldwork with local comic shops:

An adequate understanding of the readers of comic books and graphic novels must extend beyond reader–text relationships to comprise the contexts of reception. Chief among these contexts is the direct-market comic-book store. In contrast to newsstand distribution, the direct market represents the institution of comic-book collecting and connoisseurship as subcultural practices. Comics shops are not simply distribution points in a commodity chain but also a social setting that is integral to the reproduction of comic-book fandom. They occupy an ambivalent position between the comic-book industry and its consumers, and their owners must negotiate identities as fans and businesspersons. Citing findings from qualitative research conducted in three comic-book stores (part of a larger, ethnographic study of the nerd-culture scene in a Canadian city), this paper attempts to theorize these relationships: Comics shops are considered as venues for interaction among participants, as nodes in a network defined by relationships of sponsorship and promotion, as ‘interlocks’ or ‘edges’ between the contingently related fan communities served by a given store, as ‘sanctuaries’ from mainstream hierarchies of taste and status and, finally, as arenas of competition for social and (sub)cultural capital.

Immediately afterwards, I’ll be heading over to Leeds for a conference co-sponsored by the Media Industries Research Centre at the University of Leeds and the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (a joint centre between the sociology departments of Manchester University and the Open University). The conference is called Moral Economies and Creative Labour. Amongst the confirmed speakers that I am looking forward to seeing—such as David Hesmondhalgh and Andrew Sayer—I am particularly excited for a keynote from Russell Keat. His book, Cultural Goods and the Limits of the Market, which is sadly out of print and insanely expensive, really cemented for me the usefulness of MacIntyre’s moral philosophy to problems of cultural policy. I’ll be giving a paper entitled “Virtues, Vices, and Media Practices: Towards a Normative Framework for Cultural Policy”:

One important tradition in cultural theory understands the reception of cultural goods as a form of productivity. Active-audience theory usefully questioned traditional conceptions of art and culture in favour of a more democratic ethos, but its general claim for audiences’ inherent creativity or resistiveness has aged badly: it underemphasizes decisive relationships between producers and intermediaries, one the one hand, and consumers’ media practices, on the other; its populism permits the entrenchment of commercial imperatives in the cultural sector; and all audiences are not created equal. This paper examines one subcultural context, the nerd culture scene in a Canadian city, as a case study. Drawing on Alasdair MacIntyre’s theory of practices, I argue that nerds’ media-related activities cultivate certain goods and virtues but may prove vicious if their institutions become disordered. Making the former more likely than the latter is a legitimate public interest and a job for cultural policy.

“Do you mind being called a music nerd?”

In a recent post on CBC Radio 3’s blog, host Lana Gay asked whether her listeners consider themselves “music nerds.” Their responses provide some examples of people wrestling with what nerd means today, and how it relates to other terms like geek, aficionado, snob, or—dare I say?—hipster:*

• AlexofAnders writes, “I don’t really think I am that much of a music nerd. I love music, have a vinyl collection and go to shows but I don’t think I nerd out about it too much. Not in the same way as say food or old cartoons/tv/video games.”
• User venegass says, “A friend of mine once said that music is our sport, in reference to our ability to remember bands, labels, and extended data around releases and albums, much like how jocks are able to remember players and coaches and rosters.”
• And Caedus says, “The term should be Music Geek. Here’s why. A Geek can be anyone, ‘cool’ or not who has interest that could be deemed nerdy (DnD, star wars etc) . A nerd is almost never ‘cool’ or ‘hip’ and doesn’t have to have any nerdy interests at all, they are just be awkward clueless and have no idea how to dress themselves. Anyway that’s my argument. That’s why it is called ‘Geek Chic’ not ‘Nerd Nifty’ or something.”
• In typically nerdy fashion, users krib and Benoit from Ottawa refer to an authoritative source, discussing a wikiHow instruction set on telling the difference between nerds and geeks.
• And spud says it all when he or she writes, “I aspire to be a music nerd, but sadly, I am a music dork.”

These are all examples of what might be called “folk sociology” or “lay theory.”† One of the unique things about the social sciences in contrast to other branches of knowledge is that the objects of our research are themselves active, thinking subjects. That is to say, every human being is a kind of social theorist in a way that no animal is a zoologist and no rock is a geologist. People are always analyzing, classifying, and explaining the world around them. Folk sociology is not always explicitly formulated—or when it is, it may well be very contradictory—but it is implicit in our ability simply to get on with our lives.

From the point of view of “formal” or “academic” social science, lay theory often gets things quite wrong, but its errors, contradictions, and lacunae often point to real problems that professional theorists need to take account of. In this case, the Radio 3 listeners’ attempts to clarify their usage of nerd gets at a real definitional problem. Namely, we have come to use the words nerd and geek in two very different ways.

On the one hand, they’re used to describe a particularly high level of engagement or commitment to something. And the range of somethings about which one can be a geek seems to get broader all the time, as novelist Russell Smith noted in a 2007 Globe and Mail column:

Ever since computers became so important in our lives, the words nerd, geek and dweeb have undergone an almost complete reversal of connotation, from negative to positive[.…] A geek no longer means someone with no social skills, but someone with specialized knowledge. People say, for example, ‘I’m a wine geek’ to mean ‘I’m middle class,’ or ‘I’m a finance geek’ to mean ‘I’m quite rich.’ People proudly say, ‘I have these dweeby interests’ to mean ‘I’m educated.’ The phrase ‘geek chic’ has become so overused in magazines it almost means simply fashionable.

On the other hand, they’re still used in relation to a more specific conception of nerd culture, the “nerdy” interests that Caedus, above, associates only with geeks, and with certain stereotypes about their character and interpersonal style. The relationship between these two uses is very much an open question, but it seems to me that when lifestyle reporters and op-ed columnists say that it’s now cool to be a nerd because Bill Gates is a bojillionaire, no one really is fooled into thinking Bill Gates is cool.

***

Yes, I am a Bourdieu nerd.

Pierre Bourdieu was the great theorist of classification. In his well known book on aesthetics and cultural consumption, Distinction,‡ he demonstrated that our tastes in music, art, food, decoration, and so much more, which we often understand as expressing something deeply true about us, are distributed unequally through the social field—in particular, they are correlated with class positions. For Bourdieu, classification, or naming, is a fundamental social process. Nothing is given to us that we haven’t already classified, and those classifications always have causes and reasons that are located, at least partly, “outside” of ourselves.

One important example of this is social groups. Bourdieu insists that there is nothing natural or preordained about how we carve up the social world and where we draw lines between different kinds of people. Rather, these classifications—which are concepts that we all use when we act in the world—are artefacts of on-going social processes:

In the symbolic struggle over the production of common sense, or, more precisely, for the monopoly of legitimate naming, that is to say, official—i.e., explicit and public—imposition of the legitimate vision of the social world, agents engage the symbolic capital they have acquired in previous struggles, in particular, all the power they possess over the instituted taxonomies, inscribed in minds or in objectivity, such as qualifications.**

Applied to the case of subcultural groups like nerd culture, “struggle” is perhaps too strong a word, but what Bourdieu is getting at is that the authority to define a group—what it means, what counts as “authentic” or “inauthentic” participation , who’s in and who’s out—is exercised by people who have a stake in the game. For some, maintaining the group as it is is the most profitable strategy, allowing them to stay big fish in a small pond or at least to feel that they have a place in that pond (in my research, I call these people introverts); for others, expanding the boundaries of the group—mainstreaming it distinctive practices—is more likely to pay off, especially if they are able to present themselves as its legitimate spokespersons (these are the extroverts).

I’m reminded of the case of Toby Radloff, a former public servant from Cleveland, OH, who appeared off and on in the pages of his co-worker, Harvey Pekar’s independent comic book, American Splendor. Inspired by the 1984 film Revenge of the Nerds, Radloff began to bill himself as a “Genuine Nerd,” and he made appearances on MTV, a local cable access show, and in the cult films Killer Nerd and Bride of Killer Nerd.

(In this clip from the American Splendor movie, Radloff is played by Judah Friedlander, who seems to share his taste in eyewear. Friedlander’s performance may be compared against the real Toby on his YouTube channel.)

So, who should you ask what it means to be a nerd—the kids at the indie rock show? A dot-com millionaire? The nth attractive celebrity claiming to be an ex-dork while promoting their next big-budget, special effects extravaganza? Or, should you ask someone like Toby Radloff? It makes all the difference. Will the “real” nerds please stand up?

***

*Contemporary hipster and nerd cultures obviously have a lot in common. Some points of convergence include trivia as cultural capital, gadgets, and a similar canon of nostalgic childhood reference points. With their predilection for gigantic plastic glasses frames and narrow-legged, too-short trousers, hipsters have recently come to resemble former stereotypes of nerdy dress (i.e., Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor), but they don’t look an awful lot like most black-tee-and-jeans nerds that I know.

†A book I’m currently reading, Andrew Sayer’s Moral Significance of Class (Cambridge University Press, 2004), has some very interesting discussions of lay concepts (in this case, those of class) and of the moral ideas that stand behind them.

‡Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).

**Pierre Bourdieu, “The Social Space and the Genesis of Groups,” Theory and Society 14 (1985): 731–32; emphasis in original.

For those of you playing our home game, the first of two phases of fieldwork was completed last summer, and I’ve since been processing, analyzing, and writing up the data I collected (e.g., my recent post on subcultural scenes). Watch this space for more products of that work.

I’m currently recruiting participants for the second phase of fieldwork, which will involve interviews with a sample of between 4 and 8 “typical” and “atypical” participants in the nerd-culture scene. These interviews will cover personal background (life history); experiences participating in nerd culture (subcultural career); patterns of participation and consumption, including collecting; and reflections on contemporary “mainstreaming” trends (the whole “revenge of the nerds”/“geek chic” discourse). I will accompany these volunteers for participant-observation in/of their nerd-culture-oriented practices and activities (e.g., shopping for comics, playing D&D, attending an anime convention). What I’m trying to understand in this phase of research is how individual participants make sense and make use of the resources available to them in the nerd-culture scene.

Study participants seldom make passes at researchers wearing glasses.

If you found this blog from a poster or pamphlet with that graphic on it, welcome; and if you’re considering volunteering, I hope you can find all the information you need about the study here. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me (nerdstudy@benjaminwoo.net), and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

(cc) Flickr user Bryan Gosline.

In my research on nerd culture, I have been trying to distinguish between, on the one hand, an understanding of subculture as a kind of identity position or “imagined community” (Anderson 1983) and, on the other hand, a “subcultural scene.” The distinction here is between an abstract and trans-local field (the subculture) and a concrete, localized milieu within which individual participants pursue their cultural practices. In this post, I want to say a bit more about (sub)cultural scenes.

Scenes and Communities in Popular-music Studies

Although the the term is one that is widely used in ordinary language, I’ve borrowed it more directly from popular music studies, where its currency can be traced to a handful of essays written over the last twenty years by McGill’s Will Straw (1991, 2002, 2004). Since Straw introduced it to the discipline, “scene” has become one of its distinctive theoretical concepts (Anahid Kassabian quoted in Hesmondhalgh 2005, 27).

For Straw, the notion of “scene” is a departure point from an older conception of “musical communities.” Although it is only vaguely defined in popular use, denoting a objects ranging from “highly local clusters of activity” to globally dispersed taste cultures, yet the term “persists within cultural analysis for a number of reasons”:

One of these is the term’s efficiency as a default label for cultural unities whose precise boundaries are invisible and elastic. “Scene” is usefully flexible and anti-essentializing, requiring of those who use it no more than that they observe a hazy coherence between sets of practices or affinities. For those who study popular music, “scene” has the capacity to disengage phenomena from the more fixed and theoretically troubled unities of class or subculture (even when it holds out the promise of their eventual rearticulation). At the same time, “scene” seems able to evoke both the cozy intimacy of community and the fluid cosmopolitanism of urban life. To the former, it adds a sense of dynamism; to the latter, a recognition of the inner circles and weighty histories which give each seemingly fluid surface a secret order. (2002, 248)

The idea of community “presumes a population group whose composition is relatively stable—according to a wide range of sociological variables—and whose involvement in music takes the form of an ongoing exploration of one or more musical idioms said to be rooted within a geographically specific historical heritage” (1991, 373), and such a conception is no longer tenable (if, indeed, it ever was) given the globalization of musical forms. A scene, by contrast, is a more fluid and changeable cultural space characterized by “the building of musical alliances and the drawing of musical boundaries” (1991, 373). More recently, Straw has expanded his definition of scenes beyond musical practices to embrace “particular clusters of social and cultural activity without specifying the nature of the boundaries which circumscribe them” but which may be distinguished by location, genre, or “the loosely defined social activity around which they take shape” (2004, 412).

This understanding of a cultural scene is an important corrective to some of the “fetishizing” tendencies in subculture theory that I have discussed elsewhere. Subcultures researchers have too often mistaken their own Platonic idea of a subculture (mod or goth or punk or whatever) for an actually existing reality. Rather, such ideal “subcultures” are accepted, rejected, appropriated, negotiated, and adapted by participants in an on-going practice (or set of practices). However, these practices are socially situated: They take place in a local context where some resources are available and others are scarce, where some opportunities for participation are abundant and others rare. This more or less geographically bounded context is what I am calling, borrowing from Straw, a subcultural scene.

The Nerd-culture Scene

This concept is both theoretically and methodologically important to how I’m approaching my study of nerd culture. My research up until this point has been trying to explore the nerd-culture scene in one Canadian city from the point of view of specialty retailers and non-profit fannish organizations. As may be seen from the following figure, the nerd-culture scene is highly interconnected at the level of stores and organizations. Research sites sites were connected with one another and with other local and trans-local actors by relationships of patronage, cross-promotion, and sponsorship.

(This graph was produced using yEd, a multi-purpose graph editing application. Nodes and connections were entered from interviews and fieldnotes, and connections are not weighted. yEd’s organic layout, natural clustering, and automatic grouping algorithms were used to organize the representation of the scene. Icon size represents centrality, measured in terms of number of connections.)

Observed relationships among participants and institutions divide the field into four major clusters or sub-fields:

• The largest cluster (in the upper right) is dominated by nerdy film society ORG1, its president ORG1-p1, and the local SF&F convention, and so this might be considered the field of media fandom, although gamers’ networking portal ORG4, game shop STR2, and nodes associated with video games also appear in this region of the graph.
• The second cluster (bottom right) comprises game shops STR2 and STR4, as well as the many games that both stores support with regular events. ORG4-p1’s inclusion and the numerous games-industry members who sponsor ORG1 events draw this cluster as a whole closer to the first field.
• The third grouping (upper left) was constructed by combining two smaller clusters, denoted by the two different shades of green. They both dealt primarily with comic books but separated ORG3 and its conventions from the retail stores, STR3 and STR5.
• The fourth and final field (bottom left) mainly deals with anime fandom. Although anime fans might logically be considered a sub-field of the broader media-fandom field, the clustering and grouping of observed relations suggests that it constitutes a relatively distinct, parallel fan community. University club ORG2 also embraces gaming activities, but these appear to be largely unconnected with the wider gaming communities within the scene.

One way of understanding a subcultural scene, then, is as a nexus of niches. The relationships mentioned by interviewees and directly observed during fieldwork are presumably only a small fraction of the total ties that bind the scene together (especially with respect to participant mobility between events and stores), and so the figure is incomplete. Nonetheless, it helps substantiate the intuition that consumption within the context of practices can never be entirely private and dispersed. The simple transactions required to access or acquire the objects of their interests implicate consumers in a complex and fluid network of relationships. Some of these are known or potentially knowable; others are hidden but no less influential for their obscurity. The inevitability of these relationships gives force to the sense of nerd culture as a scene.

References

Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.

Hesmondhalgh, David. 2005. “Subcultures, Scenes or Tribes? None of the Above.” Journal of Youth Studies 8 (1): 21–40.

Straw, Will. 1991. “Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change: Communities and Scenes in Popular Music.” Cultural Studies 5 (3): 368–88.

———. 2002. “Scenes and Sensibilities.” Public 22/23: 245–257.

———. 2004. “Cultural Scenes.” Loisir et societe/Society and Leisure 27 ‚(2): 411–422.

Cover, The Rise and Reason of Comics and Graphic Literature

In a chapter in the recently published The Rise and Reason of Comics and Graphic Literature: Critical Essays on the Form (Amazons.com/.ca), I examine how truthfulness is represented in (ostensibly) non-fiction comics, focussing primarily on Sacco’s Palestine. While many scholars have looked at this concept in terms of autobiographical comics, comics journalism–which seems to entail a higher standard of “objective truth”–has been relatively neglected up until this point. I use the twin concepts of “information” and “experience,” drawn from the work of the Frankfurt-aligned critic, Walter Benjamin, as ideal-types to structure my examination of comics journalism’s “regime of verisimilitude.”

This piece has had a long history. I want to thank my friend Bethany Lindsay for providing me with her notes from an unpublished interview she conducted with Sacco and the book’s editors, Joyce Goggin and Dan Hassler-Forest.