Technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral. This dictum—known as Kranzberg’s first law of technology (Kranzberg 1986)—is a good starting point for this chapter, in which I develop the analytical toolkit that draws together the three field studies that are at the core of this text. Like Melvin Kranzberg, I do not see digital technologies as inherently good or bad. Instead, I see devices and platforms as woven together in networks of people and spaces but as unevenly distributed, serving some people better than others. To think about the capacity of digital technologies to support countercultural communities, it is helpful to step away from thinking of technologies as ideologically neutral and instead to consider the contexts in which they are created and deployed.
The first goal of this chapter is to present three persistent assumptions about online technologies—that online activity relates to (dis)embodiment, that the Internet is a platform for authenticity and experimentation, and that web-based interactions are placeless. Looking at dominant claims about the use and design of online technologies allows me to show that they are nonneutral and always already laden with prioritized, legitimized uses. The same origin stories that provide a slanted and limiting framework for viewing a technology can also shape assumptions about how a given set of tools and devices should be used. My objective is to set up a clearer contrast between prevailing assumptions about online technologies and the practices of countercultural communities. I return to these strategic narratives in the book’s conclusion, using analysis of fieldwork to evaluate and speak back to conventional discourses of social relationships and online technologies.
The second goal of this chapter is to develop an analytical framework for considering practices and tactics of countercultural communities. Synthesizing scholarship from STS, communication theory, information science, and Internet studies, I develop a list of features that are important or useful for communities of alterity—legibility (technologies created in ways that allow community members to track and adjudicate changes over time), flexibility (technologies that lend themselves to tactical practices of improvisation and change), and authenticity (technologies that reflect countercultural ideology). Throughout this book, I return to these features to assess the tactical capacity of the sociotechnical assemblages used by people in the groups that I am analyzing, helping to build a more coherent understanding of how online technologies support the coming together of alternative communities.
Given how ingrained online technologies have become in everyday life, it is easy to forget the initial excitement surrounding the emergence of online tools and the enormous range of conjectures and demands that immediately arose regarding the Internet. I want to treat these genres of excitement seriously as narratives that indicate how (and for whom) the Internet has been imagined. In de Certeau’s (1984) terms, the assumptions that I am outlining are strategic in that they stem from dominant, institutional framings of the Internet as a set of communication tools and socioeconomic possibilities (Chun 2006; Flichy 2007). By working through these narratives (which have received significant critical attention in Internet studies scholarship), I examine the reasons for their persistence in everyday conversations about the Internet. When we hold on to notions of the Internet as something that allows disembodied users to explore authentic selves, removed from time and place, what exactly are we holding on to? Whom do these narratives serve? What sorts of subject positions, identities, and communities drop out of these narratives?
In identifying three key themes relating to how the Internet is experienced and described in mainstream technological discourses (disembodiment, experimentation, and placelessness), followed by three characteristics for thinking about technological alterity (legibility, flexibility, and authenticity), I do not mean to set up a direct correlation between the two. Rather, the themes and characteristics that I have identified here provide two different lenses—strategic and tactical, respectively—for analyzing the relationships between countercultural communities and digital technologies. The countercultural appropriations that I discuss in the following chapters can be thought of as a tactical foil to the strategic narratives that I identify here, and I describe legibility, flexibility, and authenticity as the characteristics that support the work of building community for countercultural groups.
An early and popular trope about interpersonal dynamics shaped by web-mediated interactions is that online interactions are disembodied and virtual and that offline interactions are embodied and concrete. In this narrative, people leave their bodies behind to interact online, to the point that the physical body essentially ceases to matter. This rhetoric still lingers in journalistic and (to a lesser degree) academic writing and is regularly reinforced in popular science fiction. For instance, Keanu Reeves’s character Neo in The Matrix (1999) enters a cyberreality through a web portal and leaves behind his inert, vulnerable body in the real world. Feminist critiques have refuted assumptions about the trope of online disembodiment, objecting to the suggestion that the material body ceases to matter as soon as online activity begins (see boyd 2001; Burrell 2012; Hine 2015; Nakamura 1995, 2013; Rybas and Gajjala 2007). These writers note the impossibility of shutting off the components of our subjectivity that shape how we think, behave, and relate to others. As Shaka McGlotten (2013, 3) puts it in his book on queer men and digital media, “the fluidity and playfulness of cyberspace and the intimacies it was supposed to afford have been punctuated by corporeality.” In other words, the body has a tendency to reassert itself, even when we might imagine that technology allows us to leave it behind.
To some extent, the prevalence of mobile devices can make this debate feel outdated. A clear division between online and offline is increasingly difficult to maintain in a context of mobile Internet connections and always listening home devices. When we move through the world with continual online access, a tidy on/off binary seems tenuous at best. But a subtler version of this binary persists when we assign different values to online and offline behaviors and practices. For example, hate speech and threats of violence are frequently tolerated or dismissed when made online, despite examples of online harassment leading to horrific consequences (see Gutman and Haskell 2013; Newton 2013). The logic of devaluing the seriousness of online violence is often based on an assumption that the virtual is somehow less real, a response that relies on perceiving online interactions as disembodied and removed.
As is the case in all three themes of how the Internet shapes communication and identity, rhetoric of the Internet as an agent of disembodiment cannot be dismissed entirely. Medical research has offered compelling evidence of the long-term consequences of how sustained time in front of a computer contributes to sedentary living (Harding 2010). Mobile online users are not immune from health concerns, given both the physical conditions that can result from habitual use of these devices and the number of accidents that result every year from paying attention to smartphones over, say, subway trains (Collins 2013). These physical consequences stem from being engrossed in our screens and devices to the point of ignoring or forgetting the body. A clean division between online as disembodied and abstract and offline as embodied and concrete has largely (and rightly) been dismissed, yet it persists in the devaluation of online harassment and the difficult of attending to the body while online.
The concept of authenticity is connected to the previous discussion of (dis)embodiment, where freedom from the constraints of the body allows for experimentation and play, which in turn let people express themselves. The implicit understanding here is that the rules and norms of social life restrict people’s ability to express themselves fully in person. Online interactions, in contrast, permit people to identify in new ways and to play with presentation of self in terms of their gender, ethnicity, or sexuality. William Merrin (2007, para. 9) summarizes this set of assumptions, citing the early and influential Internet studies scholar Sherry Turkle:
The “self” [that Turkle] valorises may well be “multiple” and “distributed” rather than a natural real-life given, but her conclusion that the online world is a space of self-expression and an aid to greater “self-knowledge,” “personal transformation” and “growth” clearly indicates that for her the self is strengthened by its virtual connections.
Similar to the prior trope of online/offline as disembodied/embodied, communication and Internet scholars were quick to note the inaccuracies of Turkle’s stance. For example, Lisa Nakamura’s (1995, 2013) influential work on identity tourism persuasively argues that experimentation and play with different genders and races contains an inherent essentialism, “allow[ing] a player to appropriate a … racial identity without any of the risks associated with being a racial minority in real life” (Nakamura 1995, 3). A key issue here is that a person who has experimented with a marginalized identity online might think that he fully understands the experiences and history of that identity, even if his Internet interactions were in fact fleeting or superficial.
In 2011, in a dramatic enactment of the problems and complexities of authenticity, a forty-year-old straight, white man from the United States, Tom MacMaster, was exposed as the “real” author of the blog “A Gay Girl in Damascus,” which detailed everyday life as a queer woman during Syria’s Arab spring (Bell and Flock 2011). In addition to duping thousands of readers, MacMaster also conducted a relationship with a woman who believed that she was involved in a long-distance, lesbian romance. Among the reasons that MacMaster cited for impersonating someone of a different race, religion, gender, and sexuality were his desire to promote political issues and his belief that it would be a more compelling, more authentic blog if he claimed to be a queer activist in Syria rather than a concerned political commenter from Georgia in the United States. MacMaster presumed that his political argument would be more persuasive if it reflected the “authentic” experience of a queer woman in the Middle East, where there’s an undeniable irony in a straight, white man lamenting the difficulty of having his views heard and valued in public.
For MacMaster, the Internet provided a vehicle for identity tourism, but for many people, online tools are leveraged less sensationally for a different kind of performance, based not on an entirely different race or gender but on an idealized version of the self. A great deal of Internet studies research has concentrated on how technologies offer platforms for identity experimentation and self-promotion (Hogan 2010; Liu 2007). In her book on social media and white-collar workers, Melissa Gregg (2011, 101) ties the aspirational performativity of Facebook to its roots in an elite academic institution (Harvard University) and an enduring ethic of self-promotion: “Facebook is the latest means by which the aspiring middle class creates distinctive expressions of its own privileged position in social space. This is because the command of virtual territories is increasingly crucial to the rewards to be won in society at large.” The phenomenon of self-branding via online platforms has been of particular interest to people who study celebrity (Marwick 2013), a culture in which social media are important tools for both gaining and displaying status. Whether in the context of major celebrities or ordinary office workers, the strategic link between self-promotion and the Internet highlights the extent to which our online selves are constantly performed and constructed rather than innate or natural.
In addition to self-promotion, discussions of online authenticity open up debates about anonymity and pseudonymity, which sometimes are grouped as the “nym” movement. Working against claims that online anonymity leads to (or is indicative of) cybercrime and online harassment, activist and academic thinkers aligned with the nym movement argue for the advantages of pseudonymity and anonymity for personal freedom. In online communities, however, even those who use pseudonyms can be identified through markers of behavior and idiosyncrasies of interaction.1 As Celia Pearce (Pearce and Artemesia 2009, 140) notes in her account of an online gamer, “while the person’s real-life identity remains anonymous, her in-world identity, because it is persistent, cannot stay that way for long. Over time, others will recognize the traits and talents of the individual, often before she recognizes them herself.” In this case, authenticity emerges as a durable set of practices and behaviors that can resist an individual’s attempts to manufacture new or temporary behaviors. Pearce’s arguments relate to online communities because sustained, interpersonal interactions are required for the familiarity and legibility that help us identify people online based solely on behavior. In the conceptual arc that I am tracing, authenticity shifts from identity tourism to identity promotion to identity as idiosyncratic behavior. All of these understandings of authenticity take the individual as a central organizing feature, in contrast to the more collective sense of authenticity that I develop in this book and introduce at the end of this chapter.
Another common characterization of the Internet is as a tool that collapses distance and time. When content and Internet providers emphasize the speed and ease of delivering reliable and fast online connectivity, they are tapping into this rhetoric of the Internet’s ability to span the distance between producers and viewers, customers and products. Although online technologies are heralded as singular and revolutionary for their ability to communicate across vast distances quickly and easily, the Internet is only the most recent technological artifact that provokes people to say that geographic distance is being rendered null and void (see Marvin 1988). Part of the reason that the notion of collapsing of space has persisted has to do with the ways that spatial metaphors proliferate in common discourses about the Internet. From web sites to page visits, our language for talking about online interactions is heavily indebted to metaphors of space. Critiques of these metaphors arose almost as quickly as the technologies themselves (e.g., Druick 1995; Harrison and Dourish 1996; Lyman 1998; Stefik 1997), but they endure in ways that have consequences for thinking about how the Internet functions in everyday life.
It is true that digital technologies enable cheap and immediate communication across vast distances, making transnational communication easy and even mundane. But sociocultural complications emerge from the use of these technologies, including concerns of privacy, social media burnout, and uneven access. Mark Graham (2013, 9) has suggested a troubling explanation for the persistence of spatial metaphors, particularly among policymakers, where “a dualistic offline/online worldview can depoliticize and mask the very real and uneven power relationships between different groups of people.” In other words, the claim that communication technologies collapse distance participates in a technological determinism framework, where access to technology is assumed to remedy structural inequalities of class and privilege. And distance does matter in terms of how we use and think of online technologies, who has network accessibility, and how people behave when they are removed from social, political, or economic power. In her ethnography of Internet cafe users in Ghana, Jenna Burrell (2012) describes how access to the Internet does not, in fact, neutralize distance because the young people she interviewed often struggled to understand or adapt to Western norms of online interaction. Moreover, Burrell notes that concerns over cybercrime led to calls to segregate countries like Ghana from transnational online connections, a dramatic instance of the ways that online access is not agnostic to location.
Space is not as straightforward a concept as dominant narratives about the Internet might suggest, and neither is time. Efficiency and productivity are hallmarks of how digital technologies tend to be marketed and valued, yet these same technologies can make us feel that time is being expanded or contracted (Hassan 2007). Digital devices can make work productive, but they can intrude into our personal lives (Gregg 2011), producing a sense of constant exhaustion (Mazmanian 2015). The Internet can also impose its own sense of time. For example, people who play massively multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORGs) usually need to coordinate efforts across several time zones (Nardi 2012). In some games, time is calibrated to servers’ ability to complete tasks, meaning that time is calculated with computers’ rather than people’s actions as the organizing principle (Torfi Olafsson, private communication, 2016). Because digital technologies can speed up, slow down, or otherwise alter our perceptions of time, we need a much more robust account of how online communication tools shape our understanding of time than is typically on offer when we acknowledge only the rhetoric of workplace efficiency.
Readers familiar with Internet studies and computer-mediated communication scholarship might be surprised by the extent to which I have discussed tropes about the Internet that have been thoroughly batted around in scholarly debates.2 Despite the academic attention that has been paid to the problematic rhetoric of online/offline binaries and the hollow promises that the Internet allows for authentic identity work and collapses distance, these tropes continue to carry weight. In advertisements and university classrooms, associations between digital technologies and disembodiment, authenticity, and traversing time and space are common. These promises support a powerful network of industry actors—including Internet providers, social media startups, and smartphone manufacturers—who have a vested interest in promoting claims that online resources are not just convenient but necessary and moreover are a form of self-expression. As rhetoric about the Internet as a means of identity work, self-exploration, and interpersonal connection becomes ingrained in our understanding of how these tools are meant to be used, the tools themselves become naturalized into the structures and norms of everyday life, ensuring the survival and profitability of the corporations that produce and develop digital technologies. Moreover, the normalization of communication technologies as being aligned with mainstream identities and industries forecloses other sociotechnical possibilities. The real consequences for bodies, relationships, and corporate interests all point back to Kranzberg’s law, demonstrating the ideological stakes of digital technologies for both common and uncommon uses and for the prevailing logics that determine which is which.
I have opted to discuss the dominant narratives that surround online platforms at length because I want to consider appropriations of and play with technologies that emphasize different values of what online tools can do and how they should be used. If rhetorical moves like disembodied Internet use, authentic online identity work, and communication tools neutralizing space give rise to the strategic norms surrounding online technologies, how can we think about their tactical potential? In other words, if disembodiment, authenticity, and placelessness inform the dominant perceptions of digital technologies, what characteristics support its radicalization? As Nelly Oudshoorn and Trevor Pinch (2005, 1) remind us, “there is no one correct use for a technology,” and history is littered with examples of technologies that were designed to solve one problem and ended up being put to another use entirely.3 In STS literature, this repurposing of technology is often referred to as appropriation.
Technologies do not emerge fully formed from an ideologically blank, ethically neutral vault but are designed, developed, tested, and marketed by real people who have their own values, prejudices, ambitions, and assumptions about what a particular artifact should do and what a given user should look like. These assumptions are rarely explicit, but they have important consequences for the success or failure of a given technology in terms of adoption and use. In each of the field studies that comprises the core of this book, I discuss the countercultural appropriations (which I also call tactics) that emerge when each community engages with online technologies. To do so consistently and to offer a framework that can be applied to other communities, I focus on three characteristics that emerged across field studies—legibility, flexibility, and authenticity.
My analysis of online technologies and communities of alterity is influenced by academics and activists who have assembled their own metrics of technological alterity. Looking at “socialized media,” Robert W. Gehl (2014) argues that activist platforms should by definition and design offer four key features—two-way communication, decentralization, free and open-source software, and encryption. Gehl reconsiders how media systems should be designed in ways that protect user agency and facilitate projects of social justice but takes more of a top-down view of reworking dominant platforms than my bottom-up account of communities that rework or work around existing technologies to meet community needs. Writing as a legal theorist, Julie E. Cohen (2012, 255) suggests that a guiding ethic for sociotechnical policy should be fostering creativity and play: “to enable capabilities for human flourishing, the material and informational infrastructures of the networked information society must afford sufficient room for creative, material, and identity play.” When I refer to countercultural practices as a form of play, I mean in the sense that Cohen describes—technologies that allow creativity and human flourishing, both of which resonate with the broader de Certeauian influences in my work.
Research on digital media and activism has provided another set of guidelines for thinking about the political potential of appropriating Internet technologies.4 Todd Wolfson’s (2014) history of the indymedia movement analyzes how activists use online technologies as part of what Wolfson calls the cyber left. Wolfson identifies three tenets of the cyber left, including a commitment to using new media technologies, a decentralized organizational structure, and participatory democracy as a governing principle, arguing that indymedia activists focus on creating participatory technologies rather than engaging in truly inclusive political mobilization. Sasha Costanza-Chock (2014) reviews the use of digital technologies among activists, particularly young people who were working for immigration reform in Los Angeles in the United States. Costanza-Chock notes the capacity of digital media to support do-it-yourself methods and nonmainstream content, themes that I pick up in several field studies that are discussed below. Taking a comparative approach, Veronica Barassi (2015) uses ethnographic methods to investigate how European activist communities used digital media. Barassi’s account points out the advantages and drawbacks that activists assigned to online platforms as tools for political organization. Both methodologically and analytically, my approach is similar in that I work across multiple field sites to develop ideas on how digital technologies alternately support and create problems within countercultural communities.
Writing about the perceptions and uses of technology among poor and working-class women, Virginia Eubanks (2011) outlines a “high tech equity agenda” for promoting social justice in technology-related policy decisions. Eubanks argues that any radical agenda for addressing inequalities that is related to digital tools and media must take a broad view of what constitutes the technological and be willing to engage issues of income inequality, tax loopholes for corporations, social welfare programs, barriers to democratic participation, and local legislation for land use and rent control. I share Eubanks’s (2011, 156) view that any serious accounting of technological activism must extend beyond individual tools and devices because “broadening our focus beyond developing technological artifacts and skills … [opens up] a way to think more broadly about what social justice means in the information age.” Although my research relates less directly to activism, I also see the technological as deeply ingrained into the spheres of politics and civic life. Across these texts on activism and online technologies, there are both opportunities for organizing and drawbacks in the project of developing and sustaining community life.
Building on the above texts, I offer my own framework for evaluating the politics of the appropriative practices that emerge in this book, in which appropriation is identified in terms of de Certeauian values such as improvisation, experimentation, and play. In the chapters that follow, I use this framework—of legibility, flexibility, and authenticity—to assess the countercultural tactics of the communities that I have investigated, identifying points of commonality and divergence.
I use legibility to refer to a meaningful openness about how a platform is managed, maintained, and altered. My understanding of legibility is influenced by two different lenses on technology—the first from legal theories of privacy and design values and the second from library science theory on classification and cataloging schemes. In her treatise on contextual privacy, Helen Nissenbaum (2010) argues that one driver of the loss of privacy is the inability of everyday people to adjudicate entities that capture, store, and monetize individual data. This echoes Daniel Solove’s (2011) discussion of prevalent metaphors of privacy. Rather than draw on Orwellian metaphors of totalitarian surveillance, Solove describes privacy today as Kafkaesque because information continually and bewilderingly shifts between actors, systems, and networks and people are never clear about how information is being gathered, used, or archived. For Solove, understanding threats to privacy as a civil liberty is less about totalitarian regimes that monitor citizens’ movements and more about people’s inability to see or contest structures of surveillance that are increasingly common in everyday life. Similarly, by comparing the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) to Google search results, Emily Drabinski (2013) argues that the lack of access to search engine algorithms leaves us unable to interrogate the categorization of information (see also Annany 2011; Pariser 2011). Drabinski notes that although the ways that particular texts are described or located within a cataloging hierarchy can be agreed with or disputed, Library of Congress documentation allows us to trace how terms have evolved over time and how terms within the LCSH hierarchy relate to each other. Both for protecting individual privacy and understanding data, legible structures of information are crucial.
Research on craft and technology has made similar arguments against a “black box” mentality that shrouds technical functionality from view (Pasquale 2015). In this line of critique, users should be able to see how technologies are put together and how they can come apart, which also can be called an ethic of transparency. Matthew B. Crawford (2009) uses the example of luxury car engines (which are occluded and inaccessible) and old motorcycle parts (which are visible and configurable). Ethics of transparency also matter on social network sites, where important information like targeted advertising and privacy guidelines is obscured through a combination of technical and legal opacity (Turow 2011). The most utilitarian definition of legibility might be “the ability of technology users to alter design specifications at any moment,” but this level of technical skill is beyond the interests and skillsets of most social media users. I take a somewhat broader view, where legibility means “the ability of users to see and speak back to policies and practices of an online platform.” In the context of countercultural communities and their relationships to information and communications technologies (ICTs), key questions about legibility that I ask include “What mechanisms exist to identify protocols for the use and continuity of a given platform?” and “Are there articulated rules for contesting or renegotiating these protocols?”
Flexibility is the ability to reconfigure technological platforms to produce new content or interactions. One approach for thinking about technological flexibility comes from mash-up culture, where people use media tools to create, rework, and distribute media content (Jenkins, Ford, and Green 2013; Sinnreich 2010). For scholars working with mash-ups and participatory media, flexibility is valuable as a means of opening up previously restricted technologies of cultural production, and in the field studies comprising this text (particularly the punk music and drag communities), producing media content is a vital part of community participation. Yet I am more interested in practices than in content, and I look at flexibility more in terms of the processes that a technology affords and less in terms of the artifacts themselves.
As an example from feminist human-computer interaction (HCI) research, Elizabeth Goodman and Janet Vertesi (2012) evaluate the design ethics that are embedded in sex toys, noting the ways in which gender and sexuality norms are manifested in devices like vibrators and web cams. They found that the devices that most reflected feminist ethics allowed a two-way dialogue of use (between designer and user) rather than a one-way relationship of use (where a user interacts with an object only as its creators initially imagined it would be used). Although they do not use the word flexibility, Goodman and Vertesi argue for an evaluation of sex toys in terms of users’ ability to customize and reimagine them. Flexibility is also reflected in the bottom-up leadership structures that are evident in many media activist (Wolfson 2014) and gamer (Pearce and Artemesia 2009, 153) communities, which support minimally hierarchical dynamics of power that tend to arise in the absence of highly formalized leadership mechanisms. My assessment of flexibility asks about technological affordances for improvisation and play and looks to identify practices that change over time and in response to limits of larger or more mainstream structures.
The third component of my analytical framework is authenticity, or the ability of a group to see its own ethics and values in the technologies that they use in everyday life. Digital technologies are authentic when the content, policies, and design of a platform reflect users’ own ideals rather than a design that defaults to heteronormative and patriarchal values. My use of the word authentic is narrow, largely because the term is an elusive one that often is defined relationally or in opposition to something else. As Sarah Banet-Weiser (2012) argues in her book on self-promotion and branding, the meanings of authenticity have shifted over time. Romantics felt that an authentic self resides deep within, below superficial layers of sociocultural norms. For Romantics, authenticity emerges after social conventions have been peeled away, not unlike how early Internet enthusiasts viewed online experiments in identity. In Marxist discourse, authenticity is positioned in contrast to the commercial. Postindustrial Marxist ideas of human subjectivity—at least in the context of work—viewed interventions of automation as alienating, a process that leads workers to feel disconnected both from themselves and their products. There is a contradiction here between two views of technology and authenticity. In Marxist thinking, technology does not allow a true, hidden self to emerge (as early conceptualizations of the Internet proposed) but instead renders the individual less human and more robotic.
Thinking of authenticity as tied to the nonautomated was reflected by the Frankfurt school, particularly Walter Benjamin’s (2008) The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935); the craft movement (Crawford 2009; Sennett 2008); and the DIY movements (Ratto and Boler 2014). To the different discourses of authenticity that Banet-Weiser (2012) has identified, I add a Freudian narrative—in which an individual’s self-conceptualization involves a confrontation of personal desires with social norms, and authenticity accounts for those desires within a larger trajectory of psychological development. In a Freudian understanding, talking through personal desires and drives results in an authentic understanding of the self.
There is a tendency in these definitions to think of authenticity as fundamentally individual—as something that people attain for or reveal about their inner self. But communities can also develop a sense of authenticity, meaning a shared set of ideas about who they are and what matters to them. Grafting this collective understanding of authenticity onto technology, authenticity refers to the capacity of a tool or platform to reflect local ethics and values. Locality is important here as a way of avoiding the abstraction and slipperiness of defining authenticity. Tying authenticity to concrete and specific values helps ground this characteristic as a manifestation of a specific community and their ethics. When I refer to a technology as authentic, I privilege the collective over the individual and emphasize the local over the nameless and general.
In developing these characteristics as a framework for thinking about technological alterity, I do not want to imply a rigid checklist of design values or suggest that each value is necessarily present when a countercultural community uses digital technologies, nor do I support determinist arguments by implying that technologies with these features will cause countercultures to flourish and communities to thrive. I see technology and everyday practices as mutually constitutive, taking shape against and through each other. I also see communities as complex, sometimes contradictory social arrangements that are subject to change over time. In the field studies that follow, I identify practices and tactics that help define these characteristics in a grounded way, using thick descriptions of the everyday uses of digital technologies, but I also note when legibility, flexibility, and authenticity are lacking.
Beyond establishing a vocabulary for how I have come to think about digital technologies in the context of countercultural technologies, I see the framework of legibility, flexibility, and authenticity as a crucial binding agent in a comparative discussion of field studies. As a method, networked field studies involves investigating multiple communities and looking at practices that emerge across them, where they converge and diverge. Acknowledging that all technologies, including online tools, are not neutral is necessary but not sufficient for identifying the ideologies that are woven into digital platforms and the ways that those ideologies matter for people who use those tools from day to day. That work of identification and analysis requires a framework with well-articulated components—in this case, legibility, flexibility, and authenticity. Together, these concepts allow me to analyze cohesively and consistently the different efforts, successes, and failures of countercultural groups that use digital technologies as part of the everyday work of building, managing, and sustaining community.