Subcultural Capital and Micro Media

In the last edition of Pacenotes, I went through some of the ideas and data presented in Sarah Thornton’s book, Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital.

In particular, the process of enculturation, which authenticates certain technological forms and technology enabled practices, like DJing and “disc culture”, as opposed to what was previously to be the only authentic form of music: a live performance.

The process of enculturation holds lessons for social token communities. How, after all, do we enculturate the notion of holding a cryptographic token as a form of subcultural membership?

The later half of Thornton’s book offers some observations into this process. Part of it is driven by media forms that help to amass subcultural capital. Since social tokens are, in some ways, the ultimate mediated communities, taking shape entirely on the internet, it’s useful to consider how forms of niche and micro media, among others, gave rise to club subcultures.

Micro-Media

What’s micro-media? In Thornton’s clubland of the 90s, it’s flyers. (Aside: as a onetime denizen of clubland in the 2000s, actual printed flyers handed out by random people on the street is mainly how we found out about things).

Here are some features of micro-media:

• Low circulating
• Narrowly targeted (“Club promoters talk about how the dissemination of flyers is a deceptively tricky business: one must be wary of printing too many and finding them littering the streets; of depositing them in unsuitable places and procuring a queue full of ‘wallies’. The dispersal of flyers influences the assembly of dance crowds; the flow of one affects the circulation of the other”)
• Romanticized as being “pure and autonomous,” epitomizing the authenticity of dance subcultures.

Examples of micro-media include printed flyers handed out on the street by teams of promoters; mailing lists maintained by promoters (like, actual paper mail); pirate radio; and most curiously, “computer information phone lines … when one became a member of a club organisation, one received a number to call for information about their forthcoming events”.

The computer stuff bears repeating. Thornton points to a nascent innovation known as the internet towards the end of her chapter on micro-media, utilising email lists and websites, including a mention of Hyperreal, a dance music website set up by Brian Behlendorf (yes, he of enterprise blockchain reknown), which at one point was the centre of dance music culture on the internet.

Flyers, in particular, were perhaps the most distinct form of micro-media in the clubbing subculture. Thornton cites Cynthia Rose’s book Design After Dark: The Story of Dancefloor Style where flyers are described as “semiotic guerilla warfare”. The metaphor is that club flyers are akin to political handbills, presumably a rousing call to arms by rebellious youth against mainstream mores. This sounds a little like current crypto meme culture.

The making of a subculture

So finally, what does Thornton make of subcultural media and the subcultures themselves? She challenges the then-widely held assumption that youth cultures stood somehow apart from the media. The idea there is that the youths were engaged in some cultural activity and the media merely reported on that activity: “Youth subcultures are not organic, unmediated social formations, nor are they autonomous, grassroots cultures which only meet the media upon recuperative ‘selling out’ or ‘moral panic’.”

Instead, Thornton suggests a much more entangled relationship, akin to Anthony Giddens’ “reflexivity of modernity”. Here, subcultural media grows in tandem with the subculture itself, with both structures shaping each other. Journalists study cultural theories and read sociology, which in turn inform the way they view the musical scenes they report on, which in turn inscribes certain meanings upon those self-same musical scenes, and the scenesters who read those articles. “Communications media create subcultures in the process of naming them and draw boundaries around them in the act of describing them,” she writes.

In an important sense, then the media that a subculture consumes is the thing that that subculture becomes. “In the case of youth, the difference between the ‘hip’ and the banal, honourable and trash culture tends to correlate with amount and kinds of media exposure — some media legitimate while others popularise, some preserve the esoteric while others are seen to ‘sell out’”, Thornton writes.

Social tokens and the media imperative

What conclusions can we draw here for social tokens? For starters, it’s probable that in order for social tokens as a whole to become authenticated, it requires a class of media producers to “name and draw boundaries” around the subcultural space. Once that process of inscription begins, the “reflexivity of modernity” can take place: the media products feeding the subculture, and the subculture giving more grist to the media producers.

In turn, for a specific social token to amass subcultural capital, we might think that media production within specific communities is required. This might take the form of fan art, meme construction, and more.

A successful design for a social token might then take the needs of media producers into consideration. A community treasury might allocate a percentage of funds for news and other forms of media about a specific community. A platform like Rally might vote to fund documentaries, comics or other media forms about social tokens as a whole.

Finally, these media products need to be re-circulated back into the communities that they cover, in order for the reflexive process to begin taking place.

It’s important to note also Thornton’s cautionary tone: A subculture becomes the media it consumes, to a degree. Social token communities and platforms, then, must choose carefully when and if they decide to fund subcultural media.