Fall of the Subculture?
This article is inspired by an interaction on threads, where I am now basing the majority of my online activity for writing and commentary.
This caused a long train of questions, surely hipsters went mainstream? How do you define a subculture? Is a subculture as simple as a ‘look’, how ‘loose’ does a connection between people need to be prior to ‘it’ becoming too disunified to be a subculture?
Prior to the internet, subcultures were very visual and loud. In an era of slow communication, expensive to process photography and limited/amateur distribution. You frankly could easily organically grow such a movement at the scale and speed that can now occur. Meeting areas such as specific venues became integral for people to interact and the culture to be created and then evolve. This was restricted partly by geographic location (this geographic condition is why in the UK you can find different accents and words in use for example by traveling to the next village, town or valley).
Heavy metal is a prime example, its origins is the industrial (now Ex industrial) city of Birmingham in the North of England. A city of steel furnaces, harsh cold winters and a strong working class community, it’s this combination that allowed metal to start and flourish where the flow power hippy movement of the 1960s would not. It’s easier to be a hippy in the warm and sunny California than the cold and damp North of England. The symbols of the scene with the semiotics they carried and developed make sense in this context. Cold weather, because of the price of running a car most people could not afford a car what would you drive? A motorbike. Flying jackets and leather coats being easily accessible to the audience and the musicians. Interestingly, the flying jackets like the trench coats and combat boots prior to doc martins, origins can be found in army surplus stores where because of the quantities of stock post World War Two meant these were in large supply and very cheap. So they were very affordable to low income workers and teenagers. Metal very much reflected the local area, the types of tough work being done and the lives of the people there through the audience and artists. Without this melting pot I doubt that the genre would have evolved the way it did and the foundations would not exist (like Black Sabbath).
With the internet, would a culture with online origins be as bound by geography, by class or as restricted by the local price of items that make up the symbolise it?
This is quite complicated. By the nature of the internet and widespread access to phones. Any subculture or interest is theoretically accessible. Key word of theoretical. Ingroups will always have ‘in language’, codewords or visual identifiers (iconography or terms) to signal to others they are part of a group. Never before has special interests such as watches and pens too customer complaints to political movements been so accessible for people to engage with, find the items that make up the interest or so cheaply. With the geographical element negated, the barriers to entry are lower, you are able to display it differently (joining a subreddit is far more accessible than finding a specific area to then try to talk to or overhear a conversation).
But does participation equal exposure? To place a comment in a forum is surely worth more than just reading a forum. Buying something like a piece of clothing related to the group is probably worth more just commenting in groups (or does it?). While not perfect, we have a basic idea through observation that there are different levels of engagement and I’m sure that will resonate with you. As an example, it’s clear from reading twitter/x that football fans who regularly attend games do look down on people who only watch on the TV, showing a difference in observation and participation attitude and outlook within a subset of football fans.
In retrospect, during COVID this was dialled up to a thousand. Prior going back to 2001/02 there were niche specialised forums and people could have an interest and find similar people online. During COVID with the rise of short form content on platforms like tiktok people could discover and then engage with whole new groups in rapid time. In addition to subgroups developing their own subcultures. One example is the watch community, within it there are groups about Russian watches and within that there are groups around specific brands, more around modding and other areas that function as markets for those groups. While several decades ago the depth of interest might have been to the country of origin for the watch (think about an interest you have and then think about the depths of esoteric groups within it, then consider to what degree you could have engaged with or learned about it just from your local town/village).
There is an additional factor of the ease of creating content around said interest. It’s never been easier to create stuff about an interest, put it out there and find an audience. During COVID the aesthetic of dark academia took off, it was already a thing on Tumblr going back to 2011/12 but it gained velocity when people wanted to experience a learning environment different from their bedrooms, where there was a desire to learn for the sake of learning and escape the high costs of university in the UK where people are working more to try and cover what they are studying. The environment was one that people shared (living situation, desires and other factors like cost), but people were able to create content very quickly at scale for people to engage with and with the tools of platforms algorithms to place the content with people who engage with that content (an unpopular but fundamentally true point is that social media is a reflection of people, as a rule you see what you engage with and the more you engage with the more you see — more for a future article). It is fascinating as a thought experiment to consider how that growth occurred. The role of the pandemic and the lockdowns, the iconography of an idealist attitude to education (the 1800s–1900s British boarding school in terms of buildings and looks) and the role of the terms and identifiers (clothing, particular books like the secret histories or films like the dead poets society for example). There were other peculiarities about this with the international appeal of this, the similar idea of what said schools and clothing would look like, across different continents and area of study. One of the reasons I think the idea of an old British boarding school becoming the visual look could be the role of Harry Potter for a generation (what could be more idealistic than learning magic in a castle to solve problems?).
As someone looking in, how could you tell if someone was a part of this subculture? If you don’t know the visual codes you would not have a clue — with the lockdowns you would not have been able to see these at all in some cases. Or the most telling is access to someone’s social media feed to see straight from the source.
Perhaps the reason why so many subcultures are disguised is because of the overt Americanisation of culture? The media from films and music most people consume the majority of the time are American creations, from the language and ideas to clothing and behaviours. In addition to how this has spread across the world. Look to most countries and you will see young people in sportswear and trainers maybe with a takeaway coffee in hand using Americanisation’s of words to communicate. With how homogenised this is, are most cultural movements we see happening within the context of international American culture? If your wearing American sportswear, using American slang, with a focus on consuming American politics at what point are you viewing the mainstream through an American lens? In which case you’re already trying to fit into a mainstream and your online activity can be hidden away and explored free of this mainstream. I lack the words to try and properly analyse this point, but I have got stuck on this for a while trying to break it down, if a reader does have the words to properly break this down I will be interested in reading it.
To conclude, it is most definitely harder to identify physically what subcultures someone may be within. Most likely by the homogenisation of American culture worldwide that people are trying to signal they are engaged with. Their online presence allows them to engage freely with other interests. Because you are able to engage with so many at once, and with so much depth. There has never been potentially so many different subcultures yet there have never been so few visible in a public area.
