This book tells the stories of people who have been brought together and driven apart by digital technology. Drawing on years of qualitative fieldwork, I have sketched the different practices and tactics that take shape as these groups work to build, sustain, and protect their collective sense of identity and alterity. Countercultural narratives complicate, disrupt, and reorient conventional assumptions about the role that technology plays in daily digital life, providing a richer, more complex narrative of digital media. I have highlighted the ethics of legibility, flexibility, and authenticity as a way of identifying how tensions between mainstream and outsider narratives of digital technologies are operationalized and how broader discourses about technology manifest in everyday tactics and practices.
My first field study looked at Body Modification Ezine (BME), which grew out of an early and experimental phase of online community building and came into its own as the now-dominant social media platforms were beginning to sprout. BME delivered on some of the earliest promises of online technologies—connecting people across distances, convening a public of misfits who would otherwise have struggled to find opportunities for regular interaction, and allowing its users to engage in conversation and reveal parts of themselves in ways that many felt were impossible in offline contexts. In analyzing some of the changes made to IAM’s terms of service (TOS) throughout the site’s history, I identified different experiments in managing membership. BME’s policies were not perfect. Rules could be unevenly or subjectively enforced by administrators. Nonetheless, these processes offered a high degree of legibility, as shown in users’ ability to trace rules and policies in the site’s day-to-day operations. IAM elevated the TOS from a routine, default document to an evolving, commonly referenced set of guidelines that were subject to community feedback and incorporated into daily interactions, conversations, and disputes. IAM’s reliance on an open structure of feedback on its policies (and their enforcement) contrasts with illegible platforms that make rules of use and membership obscure to ordinary users. A key point here is that legibility is not just something technical: it is also fundamentally social. IAM’s TOS is significant not because of its technical features but because it became so ingrained in the social conversations and understandings of membership.
Ultimately, however, external rather than internal forces were most responsible for IAM’s decline. In terms of both media content and user participation, IAM was eventually replaced by Facebook. This transition took shape not through a hostile, corporate takeover but through the mass defection of members who were lured by larger audiences and more sophisticated design features. The site struggled to convince its members to continue posting on IAM rather than competing, mainstream venues, and eventually body modification user groups sprung up on Facebook, exporting content directly from BME. As a field study, BME and IAM point to a key de Certeauian tension of cultural politics—the struggle to retain a sense of identity and alterity amid hegemonic cultural institutions.
Communities of alterity develop sociotechnical practices in ways that respond to and reflect their relationships to the mainstream, playing out across many different sociotechnical relationships. For members of New Brunswick’s punk community, part of the allure in using older, less sophisticated technologies has to do with positioning themselves as countercultural. For example, their limited engagement with Facebook (at least in the context of show information) is intended to demonstrate a commitment to DIY and punk values. The basement community represents itself as being on the margins through aesthetic choices (in how they dress and what kind of music they play) and through their relationships to technology. In contrast to dominant narratives that young people are dependent on Facebook for their communication needs, New Brunswick punks take a critical and measured approach to mainstream social network sites. In addition, they have also embraced older platforms, such as message boards and paper flyers as familiar forms of media and communication. In the basement community, representations of alterity take shape in the different technological assemblages that inform how fans find out about a show’s location and in the flexible gatekeeping mechanisms that reflect commitments to secrecy.
There are many reasons to leverage online technologies in the service of secrecy, such as criminal behavior (Brunton 2013) and political resistance to surveillance (Bossewitch and Sinnreich 2012). The defining features of the New Brunswick basement community’s relationships to technology are flexibility and authenticity, where a sense of collective commitment and solidarity draw on local understandings of DIY values. Practices of secrecy among New Brunswick basement members make for an interesting contrast with a site like Silk Road, an online clearinghouse for quasi-legal and illegal assets like drugs and store coupons. Both are invested in keeping secrets from the police, but the sociotechnical practices in the former are concerned with collectivity, ideology, and values, whereas the latter’s are a fairly straightforward attempt to keep legally perilous activities undercover. In other words, Silk Road users are interested in keeping their own activities private, where New Brunswick punks are interested in keeping their community events secret in a commitment to localized, DIY values. Even members of the basement community who felt that the rules of communication might be overly constraining or performative ultimately expressed a willingness to comply because not doing so risked ostracism from the community. In the New Brunswick basement community, individual technologies and platforms come and go, and sociotechnical flexibility is key to the community’s longevity.
For Brooklyn’s drag community, the focus of my final field study, mainstream social media sites like Facebook and Instagram are vital tools on both individual and community levels. Platforms like Instagram supported the promotional work of advertising upcoming shows and provided a digital record of performances. Social media sites provided an important archive of the trajectory of performances, which participants described as important for personal development and for the relational labor of maintaining their fan base (Baym 2015). Many drag queens were self-taught seamstresses and makeup artists, and they described using YouTube videos and Instagram photos to hone their skills of getting “in face.” Digital technologies were also vital in forging and maintaining community ties, both on the local level of connecting to other drag queens who lived nearby and also on the level of connecting Brooklyn drag to a larger archive and community of queer culture. Yet even as mainstream social media fill these important roles, the performers I interviewed were conflicted about the consequences of using these sites to archive, connect, and communicate. They were wary of (and fatigued by) a pervasive sense of relying on social media platforms and worried about the long-term social consequences of technological dependence, such as alienating or antisocial behavior.
More specific to their identities as drag performers, participants were frustrated by policies that they experienced as illegible, inflexible, and antiqueer. Several participants viewed Facebook as a homophobic platform, and they experienced Facebook’s policies on authentic names as problematic for their identities as drag queens. The real-name/authentic-name policy was even more troubling in terms of the opacity of reporting users for violations. When queens had their pages frozen, they had no way to create a dialogue between users who reported each other or between users and Facebook administrators. Participants found it frustrating that Facebook claimed to want its users to express themselves and document their lives only to censor those expressions through policies that demand normative identities. This tension is one of authenticity, which I have presented as the ability of members of a countercultural community to see its values and norms reflected in the platforms that they use in their everyday lives.
I now want to return to a core question woven throughout the field studies comprising this book: how do online technologies help or hinder community building? The answers matter for sociologists, tech designers, activists, policy makers, and individual web users. Given these different stakeholders, I unpack two sets of implications—the first for Internet studies scholarship and the second for design. First, I concentrate on the extension of my analytical framework and methodological approach. I advocate for the kinds of projects and methods that can further develop an accounting of technological alterity in the context of digital technologies. Second, I consider implications for design. Drawing on the framework of flexibility, legibility, and authenticity, what implications are there for building better online platforms? What policies, governance guidelines, and design ethics can we tease out to support communities of alternative people?
Implications for Theory
The practices and tactics that countercultural communities develop are part of a process of making different technologies meet their needs and sometimes even feel like home. Countercultural practices stem from a gap between fitting and misfitting in a sociotechnical system, and it is from this gap that I can speak back to some longstanding debates in Internet and media studies theory. These debates are introduced in chapter 2 as the strategic narratives against and within which countercultural tactics operate. Looking across the communities that I have studied, I concentrate on dynamics of space, anonymity, and media activism.
Trade-offs in Mobility and Place
Part of what countercultural communities do online is to make the platforms and systems that they use feel like home, meaning a shared sense of place. In chapter 2, I warn against spatial metaphors for the Internet, so I want to avoid similarly careless comparisons between the web and space here. However, my objections to spatial metaphors are rooted in a need to be attentive to the metaphors and euphemisms that surround a particular technology. Spatial metaphors for the Internet are paradoxically invested in presenting space as immaterial and inconsequential. These assumptions are particularly apparent in a “mobile first” design ethic, which assumes that mobile phones rather than desktop computers should be the primary design case for online platforms. The emphasis on apps and cross-platforms has been known to leave out those who are disconnected or minimally connected (Crawford 2013), but in addition, we need to ask about those who prefer to produce their own sense of place through online interactions. What about communities that value online platforms because they provide a sense of copresence?
When I asked Rachel Larratt, the current owner of BME, about the claims in Facebook’s user guidelines (Facebook 2015) that it is a “global community,” she rejected this bid for shared togetherness: “It’s all marketing … they are trying to foster that idea [of being a community]. It’s just staged, really, like a big box store trying to pretend like they are a local small business owner.” Herself a small business owner, Rachel does not reject the commercial interests of Facebook, just its claim that Facebook as a whole constitutes a community. Later in the interview, Rachel returned to this metaphor of Facebook as a giant chain store:
Facebook is the Walmart of the Internet. Facebook came to town and just put out of business all of these smaller niche sites. … People are starting to revolt, to be like, “No, we don’t want a Walmart in our town.” Or they try and rebuild their downtown areas where they have all these very cool old buildings that have all been abandoned … because nobody can compete with products that are of lower quality [but] for a lower price. It’s just more of the optimist in me that I’m hoping it’ll come back.
Regardless of the future of BME, Rachel hopes that a certain kind of Internet culture—with features that I call authentic, in that they reflect local values and ethics—will cycle back into favor.
Two implications about mobility and place can be made from Rachel’s comments. One has to do with retaining a sense of localized and countercultural authenticity, which I address in the next section. Another, somewhat subtler dimension of these metaphors has to do with how digital technologies are imagined as overcoming barriers of space. Rachel’s metaphors of gentrification and urban renewal reflect the de Certeauian element of making do and poaching within existing sociocultural structures, and her optimism imagines a collective uprising against the conformity of mainstream social media. Rachel identifies a kind of placelessness as the unavoidable consequence of a massive user base, much as the generic predictability of Walmart contrasts with the authentic idiosyncrasies of locally owned retail and grocery stores. This dominance of the generic over the authentic and of the mass market over the localized reveals a connection to a design ethic that privileges mobility over stability. Assuming that mobility and constant connectivity are a paradigm of access comes at the expense of recognizing the importance for online communities in feeling grounded, of feeling that their online platforms give them a sustained sense of place and copresence. Designing platforms that are geared toward mobile devices and interoperability reflects assumptions that convenience is more important than other features of online interaction, such as a sustained, grounded sense of place.
The contemporary push toward mobility assumes that people want a sense of seamless fluidity as they engage with different online platforms from their mobile devices, reflecting a “going with” rather than “going to” approach of online access. But for those who value the sense of feeling as if they are visiting a physical meeting point, seamlessness can be experienced as a loss rather than a feature. This is not an antiprogress push for a return to less sophisticated technologies but rather a call to consider whether mobility is ubiquitously desirable and who is best served by a push for the sense of uninterrupted access. Perhaps countercultural communities should pause before embracing mobility as a design goal because it is more conducive to community cohesion to think of going online as going to a space. In her work on for-profit educational institutions, Tressie McMillan Cottom (2014) has argued persuasively that much of the rhetoric of online education positions students as “roaming auto-didacts,” people whose work and family commitments are endlessly flexible and who have the necessary tools for minimal interpersonal contact with professors and other students. “Mobile first” rhetoric contains similar assumptions about mobility and placelessness, which can be deeply problematic for communities that seek a sense of placefullness.
Pseudonyms, Anonyms, Multinyms
Powerful actors in the tech community have all but dismissed the possibility of using social media anonymously. In 1999, Sun Microsystems’ chief executive, Scott McNealy, said, “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” In a 2009 CNBC interview, Eric Schmidt of Google said of online behavior, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook argued that privacy was “no longer a social norm” (all quotes cited in Popkin 2011). In the “nym wars” that oppose these views, advocates have argued for experimentation and play, and detractors have argued that crime, fraud, and harassment flourish when people do not have to use their real names. Tensions between social media policies and identity work surface in chapter 5, with drag queens squaring off against Facebook about how to verify accounts. Multinyms might be a better way of thinking about the relationships that Brooklyn drag performers have to names and identity, as they passionately defend the right to post self-determined (rather than state-determined) names on social media and to maintain multiple accounts on the same platform. Complexities of verifying identity also mattered for New Brunswick punks who were determining which request for information about music show locations should be honored and which should be deemed fraudulent. Another practice of secrecy and naming surfaced in the use of codenames for show houses, intended to cloak basement venues from those outside the punk information loop. Practices from both communities point to the importance of thinking about pseudonyms and anonyms as a form of ethical identity work.
Not all social media sites insist on state-verified identity. Some are anonymous (such as YikYak, Whisper, and the now-defunct Secret), and others encourage pseudonyms or throwaway handles (like Reddit and 4chan). These latter sites tend to be associated with harassment and crude conversations (although online harassment also commonly occurs on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube). Although it is common to conflate pseudonyms with illicit behavior—despite some research indicating that anonymity encourages pro-social interactions, with communication norms more in keeping with older Internet technologies like Internet Relay Chats (IRCs) and message boards (Ma, Hancock, and Naaman 2016)—the association between pseudonyms, anonyms, and criminal behavior is not innate but is developed over time. Criminals use pseudonyms, and anonymity can lead people to act inappropriately, but positive outcomes also result from platforms that are flexible enough to help sustain identity work. The data that I have gathered provide grounded accounts of when pseudonymity fosters rather than threatens community. Facebook’s real-name/authentic-name controversy uncovered reasons that someone might have for using names other than the one assigned at birth. New Brunswick punks demonstrated how secrecy can be part of what preserves local culture and respects local community.
An increasingly common component of login interfaces involves cross-account linking, also called bootstrapping, which makes issues of identity work and data privacy even more complex. Bootstrap logins require or encourage users first to log into or have an account with another platform, like the way that the dating app Tindr requires people to have an account on Facebook. Typically sold to users as a form of convenience, bootstrapping has important consequences for data and privacy. Cross-platform logins create tangles of identifying information that make it difficult for users to retain a sense of control over their own data or a sense of experimentation and play with identity. Internet studies research needs to move beyond studying single platforms and begin to investigate cross-platform behaviors. How do users trace the flows of their data across multiple platforms? What tactics do people use to retain a sense of selfhood and individuality? With sites becoming more integrated via mechanisms like bootstrapping, we need scholarship that is similarly mobile in accounting for data and identity.
Countercultural Social Movements
As a way of bridging implications for theory and practice, I want to draw connections between the tactics of countercultural communities and activist groups. Even activists who do not focus on the Internet as an issue often use tools and devices that reflect social justice values, such as using open-source code or products made by companies that incorporate fair labor practices. Like the New Brunswick punks who were willing to accept some inconveniences in information flows to avoid unwanted attention from the authorities, activist groups may opt for less sophisticated or user-friendly communication tools to demonstrate solidarity with other activists or laborers. Yet decisions around using open-source platforms, for example, may not be as straightforward as they at first seem.
For example, Veronica Barassi (2015) has unpacked some of the ways that efforts to identify parallels in technology use and ideology can be cumbersome or work at cross-purposes with goals of inclusion and access. Recalling how Brooklyn drag queens described Facebook, people can simultaneously enjoy features of a mainstream platform and also have serious reservations about using it. Activist groups may insist on using open-source technologies or avoid buying products that are made in inhumane working conditions, but this is only one kind of ethical orientation to digital technologies. For some groups, it may be as important to ask how a technology will be used as it is to ask how it is produced.
Media activism is a growing area of study that offers important accounts of how power is contested and distributed online. We need more research on how people manage ideological conflicts with the platforms they use, and looking at activist groups is a smart way to do this. Yet much of current social movement research in Internet studies has concentrated on leftist and progressive movements (Costanza-Chock 2014; Pickard 2006; Wolfson 2014). Focusing on conservative and ultraconservative activist groups could yield important insights into how people make sense of platform politics. I see value in studying marginalized and countercultural communities because it expands our understanding of how and by whom the Internet is used. It is equally important to be expansive in the social movements that are studied in research on digital technologies and activism.
Countercultural Values in Design
Throughout this text, I have developed a framework of legibility, flexibility, and authenticity for evaluating the capacities of different online platforms, tools, and practices to support countercultural communities. Similar to Sarah Pink’s (2014) approach to design anthropology, this framework is both conceptual and pragmatic, and provides a way of thinking about sociotechnical assemblages for supporting community and alterity. In the remainder of this chapter, I consider implications for how online tools can support projects of community, particularly for members of countercultural groups who might not be able to locate each other without online platforms or might have ideological qualms with the wholesale adoption of mainstream sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Offering pragmatic suggestions for evaluating and reworking digital technologies makes theory less abstract and grounds analysis in the daily uses, operations, and policies of a platform. These design values are not a checklist but are a set of lenses for encouraging multiple levels of thoughtfulness about the intended audiences for a given platform. My hope is that this framework can be adapted for analyzing other online platforms in the context of community (see figure 6.1). Straddling contributions for theory as well as design and drawing from all three field studies, the following sections describe the different means that countercultural groups have developed to build and sustain community.
Figure 6.1 In this table, design value questions are associated with the three-part analytical framework that structures this book (legibility, flexibility, and authenticity). The design values are intended as provocations rather than a strict checklist.
Middle Ground on Mainstream Platforms
There are two main avenues for design in the context of technology, alterity, and community—design that develops stand-alone countercultural technologies and design that works within mainstream platforms to make them more legible, flexible, and authentic. The field studies that are examined in this book offer different approaches to both work within and reject mainstream social media sites. BME grew out of its own distinctive community platform, which originally was coded and maintained by community members. In contrast, drag queens used Facebook rather than develop their own platform, although participants described ethical reservations and tactical workarounds that made the platform meet their needs. New Brunswick punks fell somewhere in between, using Facebook and Twitter up to a point while also maintaining older, more alternative platforms like message boards. Between developing countercultural platforms and operating within those that already exist, the New Brunswick punk community fashioned a kind of middle position.
This is in some sense puzzling; given the New Brunswick punk community’s commitment to older technologies, one might ask why it engaged with Facebook at all. Flyers and text messages anchored communication among a core group of dedicated members, making it reasonable to avoid other forms of technology. In interviews, participants frequently expressed a kind of grim resignation to using Facebook to communicate with others in the basement community. They saw their use of Facebook as pragmatic because bands and their audiences consist largely of young adults who increasingly prefer to communicate through social media platforms, particularly over other communication tools like email (Philipson 2014). Because most bands both consist of and have audiences who are young adults, platforms like Facebook (and to a lesser degree, Myspace) are all but required means of organizing tours.
Another factor that supports a tool like Facebook is the turnover in the community. With the local university providing a constant flow of students into the city, New Brunswick punks are to some extent beholden to whatever communication technologies dominate in the pool of potential community members. This pragmatic approach to using mainstream platforms within a countercultural context has a parallel with drag queens who promote themselves on Facebook to gain wide audiences, despite reservations about the platform as homophobic and antidrag. Both examples illustrate tactical maneuvering with even the most mainstream technologies. The New Brunswick punk community viewed Facebook as one part of a sociotechnical assemblage and assigned different roles to different platforms. For example, Facebook helped people learn that a show was happening, texting helped them get there, and message boards were used to talk about shows and bands. Brooklyn drag queens developed a number of hacks and workarounds to make Facebook suit their needs, carving out their own sociotechnical affordances for authenticity when the platform presented none. In their willingness to use mainstream platforms while developing workarounds to mitigate the limitations of those platforms, communities of alterity can build relationships to technology that reflect countercultural authenticity, even if those platforms are otherwise geared both implicitly and explicitly toward the mainstream.
Mainstream Creep
Mainstream creep, a concept that I mention briefly in chapter 3, is another manifestation of the mainstream’s potentially damaging influence on the online presence of countercultural communities. At some point, every online platform faces the question of whether and how to redesign. As new programming languages emerge, typically bringing more powerful and sophisticated technical capabilities, social media administrators often worry that unless their site keeps up, users will leave for newer sites with more appealing design aesthetics. And yet redesigning a site to keep up with technological advances can have unintended consequences, as was the case for IAM. Competition from mainstream social media sites led BME’s owners to redesign the platform. For the first time, non-BME members coded the site’s interface, and more important, mainstream social media aesthetics started to appear in IAM’s design. The site lost some of its sense of countercultural authenticity, and some longtime users began to question the countercultural values of BME’s leadership.
In contrast, the field study of the New Brunswick punk scene demonstrates the potential advantages (from a countercultural perspective) of embracing older platforms and technologies as part of a commitment to DIY values and ethics. During fieldwork, I repeatedly found that countercultural communities place less value on having the latest technologies and more on being able to trace, influence, and control structures of power and to represent themselves online in ways that reflect their local values. In this way, resisting the lure of updates can be an important means of retaining authenticity by reflecting the history of a community and its changing relationships to a particular site. Such reflections are about the materials that are produced and circulated online and also are about process. Both the content itself and the ways that it got online must represent the countercultural identity. For communities of alterity, the means for building a platform can matter just as much as the ends. Perhaps users enjoy the stability precisely because many other sites are malleable. Or perhaps the simpler, less sophisticated features act as a sorting mechanism that weeds out users in a way that supports a sense of closeness. Either way, the success of New Brunswick’s message boards (as well as sites like Craigslist and Reddit) and the difficulties encountered by BME suggest that communities might endure not in spite of a refusal to upgrade but because of it.
The Permanent Sandbox
All three of the countercultural design values that I identify (legibility, flexibility, and authenticity) are bound up in the principle of the permanent sandbox, by which I mean giving users mechanisms for altering or adding platform operations. In software design, the word sandbox typically refers to a prerelease version of an application where the client or end user can experiment with features and make suggestions for improvement. Instead of thinking of the sandbox as an early, finite development period, designers could build in mechanisms for user feedback into the long-term operation of the platform. I should be clear that integrating this type of configurability is distinct from redesigning for the sake of redesigning. The latter contributes to a cycle of perpetual techno-obsolescence in which devices are replaced not because they break or become unusable but because they are seen to need improvement for aesthetic or status-based reasons (Gehl 2014), with serious environmental consequences. Instead, I am suggesting a design ethic that incorporates respect for flexibility, granting users sufficient agency to guide the design of the platforms that they themselves sustain.
This shift toward user feedback and influence also could occur through a return to the flexibility of sites like Myspace. The (user-determined) messiness of profiles was commonly considered a design flaw of Myspace, both implicitly and explicitly supporting claims that the site was unsafe and a playground for predators (Marwick 2008). Yet in its place, we now have the incomprehensibility of Facebook’s shifting advertising sidebar and news feed, which are not in the user’s direct control (Couldry and Turow 2014; Eslami et al. 2015; Turow 2011). As a kaleidoscope of fonts, colors, and sounds, Myspace reflected user agency and individuality. Facebook is similarly in flux as a platform with constantly updated content, but its aesthetic and structural malleability is less visible to everyday users. When users object to a sudden design change or new usability feature, the problem is not necessarily the updated feature but often is the lack of legibility that preceded its arrival. I would argue that users can be trusted to adjust to an aesthetic that is more complex and less structured than Facebook or Twitter currently offers, especially when they have a degree of agency in these changes.
Return to the TOS
Most Internet users have adopted a blasé attitude toward corporate end-user license agreements (EULAs), sometimes also called clickwrap. Because corporations rely on clickwrap to protect themselves from the misuse of their software, average Internet users would have to spend 250 hours a year reading all of the legal documents presented to them as they go about their everyday online lives (Masnick 2012). EULAs are a tricky form of displayed obscurity—Although clickwrap documents provide detailed rules for using software or participating in a platform, their wording is so inaccessible for most web users as to be all but unintelligible. As a different model for informing users of their rights and responsibilities, I suggest a return to the terms of service (TOS). IAM treated its user guidelines as a document that mattered in everyday online life. This approach to the TOS involves thinking of user guidelines not as corporate legal agreements but as living documents that account for local constituents’ values and practices.
On the most rudimentary level, Internet policy and legal scholars have found that when terms of service and end-user license agreements are presented in common speech or include a bullet point list of key issues, users are more likely to read and understand these texts (Newitz 2005). More radically, I see the fluidity of IAM’s TOS and its emphasis on participation and feedback as an argument for a more collaborative crafting of a platform’s policies. Building a document through community input and consensus is difficult, as has been demonstrated in general assemblies at Occupy Wall Street (Occupy Wall Street 2013) and in Iceland’s attempts to crowdsource its constitution (Landemore 2014). Yet in a truly participatory process of collective sense making, the process of inclusion is as important as the product of guidelines and policies. Numerous platforms (including wikis and github) already exist for collectively designing a document. Rather than an artifact that is written by corporate lawyers with an eye toward legal culpability, a community TOS could be produced as a wiki that includes legible mechanisms for feedback and adjudication. If an online platform is truly committed to supporting community, then its users should be able to shape and contest (and not just access) its policies.
Intersectional Design Ethics
When designers try to accommodate particular communities in the structures and features of an online platform, they often design for one dimension of a user to the exclusion of other dimensions. Rather than thinking of personas (or an imagined set of specific user profiles to use for feature development) (Miaskiewicz and Kozar 2011), designers could think in terms of communities. This approach could be called intersectional design ethics—a set of values that considers the multifaceted nature of community identity.
Any design process that privileges communities over individuals needs to remember crossover and multiple memberships. In the introduction to this book, I describe three different types of community—based on practice, geography, and alterity—noting that although these categories are distinct, they often overlap. For example, New Brunswick’s basement punk community has developed a set of tactics for managing information that are rooted in its sense of alterity and commitment to the countercultural ethics of DIY production. But these tactics are also shaped by geography, in that the city is both a college town and a key stopping point between New York and Philadelphia. Concentrating exclusively on either alterity or geography tells only part of the story of how this community uses technology.
Conclusions: Communities of Alterity and/as Communities of Play
Julie Cohen (2012) has argued that the design of online technologies in support of play and creativity is a matter of human flourishing. It follows that developing tools for creativity and play is also a matter of community flourishing. Considering the different avenues for design and practice is relevant not just to people who belong to countercultural communities but also to a much wider set of stakeholders. Values-in-design conversations can have crucial legal and financial implications, in that heading off potential lawsuits or user protests can save time, money, and reputation. In the tech industry, concerns over privacy and ethics are provoked in part by high-profile cases of academic and industry researchers who overstep their authority or ignore longstanding norms of human subject research (Schroeder 2014). In suggesting the above design interventions, my goal has been to show how legibility, flexibility, and authenticity are not just part of a theoretical framework but also part of a discussion about how to build digital technologies in ways that support community flourishing.
The tactics and assemblages produced by the three groups that are examined in this book reflect the affordances and obstacles that technology provides for building and sustaining community. A close look at communities of alterity offers a vantage point for identifying the gaps between design and use, the strategic and the tactical, the mainstream and the misfit. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (2011, 592) argues that “misfitting as an explanatory concept lets us think through a particular aspect of world-making involved in material-discursive becoming.” As these groups of misfits incorporate digital technologies into the everyday tasks and interactions of community life, they bring into relief the embedded values and norms of the dominant communication technologies. The tactics that alternative communities use to make the Internet meet their local needs reveal the diverse possibilities for building and using technologies that offer crucial means of communication and community.
