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...
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...
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...