‘Tis the season to file reports of one’s progress, and so I’ve updated my research page to reflect the current state of my project. 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...
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...
For those of you who know me, it’s no secret that I’m a great admirer of the work of cartoonist Joe Sacco. For years now, Sacco has been producing what he calls “comics journalism,” a mix of auto-biography and reportage in the style of the “new journalists.” These are, to me, some of the...
Although my friend and colleague, Jay McKinnon , has pointed out in no uncertain terms its limitations and weaknesses, I couldn’t resist trying out the Google N-Gram Viewer. For those of you even farther behind on the digital humanities bandwagon than I am, this application allows one to search for keywords in the Google...
The latest issue of the graduate communication studies journal that I helped found, Stream: Culture/Politics/Technology, has been posted. It has the proceedings of this year’s Nelson Conference, where I presented a paper called “Subculture Theory and the Fetishism of Style.” The article contains a rough and ready introduction to the “post-subcultures” critique of the...
Colleagues and I just completed reading Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. We had all been seeing scads of references to this book and were quite keen on reading it. However, we were all rather underwhelmed by Hardt & Negri’s account of the emergent possibilities...
If, as Raymond Williams suggested, a culture is a “whole way of life,” then it follows that a subculture is a partial way of life. That is, subcultural participation implies a set of value orientations and practices that are neither coterminous with the entirety of a given population nor exhaustive of any one individual’s...
The productivist bias inherent in both classical economics and orthodox Marxism has delayed the recognition of the ‘consumer revolution’ that accompanied the industrial one and has come, over the course of the last century, increasingly to drive the transformation of capital. Today, however, the consumption of commodities has entangled itself with almost every facet...