Tag: subcultures

2014: Making Connections

0015_001Although I’m not pretending to have any real understanding of social interactions in general — in fact, as I often mention, I go through life feeling like I really do’t know what to do in a lot of “everyday” social situations — I find the way little communities and cliques develop to be fascinating, both to observe from the outside, and to be a part of from within.

I have a few examples in mind. First, and most prominent, is Twitter. I’ve drifted from group to group a bit since I originally joined Twitter a number of years back. Originally, my use of Twitter was primarily to have a means of talking to my online friends with whom I used to interact on 1up.com. After “The Great Exodus”, when 1up’s specialised forums were mashed together into a NeoGAF-style monstrosity of just “Games” and “Not Games”, a significant proportion of the community left the site’s forums, and many of them found themselves on Twitter. Over time, people changed, moved and became involved in different things. Some gave up on Twitter altogether; others started using it for professional purposes; others still “rebranded” themselves.

I fell somewhat into the latter category. After suffering a fairly serious instance of doxxing and harassment back in 2013 — see, it’s not just women it happens to, contrary to what the media would have you believe — I left Twitter, initially intending not to return, but after realising what a pile of crap Facebook is for actually interacting with people in a meaningful manner, I returned. After realising that the interminable social justice yelling on Twitter was setting off my depression and anxiety, I left again. This time when I came back (they always come back) I decided to “reinvent” myself a bit, and follow fewer of the people I felt I “should” be following, and instead focused on people who posted things I found interesting or enjoyable to interact with. Consequently, these days I find myself on the fringes of “anitwitter”, a subculture on the social network that discusses, posts screencaps and generally enthuses about anime and games. I, as you might expect, fit right in.

Elsewhere on the Internet, the Discord server I mentioned the other day (which, dear reader, you’re still welcome to come and join) has been developing slowly but surely, but it’s our Final Fantasy XIV Free Company server that is perhaps the more interesting example. Taking cues from the in-game friend who introduced me to Discord in the first place, I added an “NSFW” (Not Safe for Work) channel to the server. It immediately became the most active channel in the place, though initially people weren’t quite sure what to post in there, i.e. whether or not it was okay to post filth. (It was, though someone stumbled accidentally into it and complained a bit at being confronted with a wall of hentai, so we’ve since made it invite-only — community management at work!)

What’s interesting about the NSFW channel is that the usual boundaries of “politeness” that are up when interacting with other people online in real time — in my experience, anyway; I tend not to hang around with the sort of people who hurl insults and abuse at one another — are nowhere to be seen. I don’t mean that people are rude to one another; quite the opposite, in fact. The NSFW channel is a place where everyone can be open and honest about the things that they like, and where no-one judges one another for the things they talk about and post. (Or, if they do, they keep that to themselves.) It’s pretty refreshing and liberating, actually, and makes it abundantly clear that there should probably be more places for people — particularly, it has to be said, men — to be able to talk about things like sex, fetishes and all that sort of thing without fear of judgement or anything like that. I shan’t go into any further details than that, but suffice to say we’re all having a jolly old time in there.

Anyway, yeah. Online communities. Just as interesting as real communities, I think you’ll agree…

#oneaday Day 564: Cliquety Clique

Watch any kind of American teen “coming of age” movie (or indeed play Bully) and you’ll come across some combination of the same old cliques. The jocks, the nerds, the preppies, the plastics, the goths and the “normal” people.

There are many, many subcultures out there, particularly among the more youthful members of society. But I don’t remember there being cliques that were quite so clearly defined back when I was at school — and yet when I talk to other people, it often becomes clear that they did exist.

I’m not sure if this is because I went to school in a relatively out-of-the-way place where, if we were playing Civ, there would not be a particularly high flow of Culture points. But the fact remains that so far as cliques went, there wasn’t anything anywhere near as obvious as the typical subdivisions we’re conditioned to “expect” from the media nowadays.

There were a few cliques, sure, but these were mostly friendship groups. There were the guys who were into football, the people who were into music, the people who did stuff in the school plays, the people who always went on trips. But no-one tended to let their clique define who they were — and in fact, given the amount of bleed-through between the different groups, it’s questionable whether they really were “cliques” after all.

The closest I came to any kind of clique membership back at school was my involvement in music groups. That meant I often tended to hang out with the same people when doing school activities — but outside of that I had other friends, too. Those other friends didn’t particularly belong to any subculture — they were just “friends”. Or at least that’s the way I saw them — I never looked at person X and thought “well, he’s clearly a [whatever]”. The only exception to this was one guy in sixth form who was very much into paganism, tarot card reading and all manner of other things and he was branded, in that inimitable high school way, as “the weird one”. And, of course, the kids from the local special school who joined us in sixth form and formed their own little clique — which, being politically incorrect highschoolers, most of us were quite happy to let them do.

Technically speaking, if I was a member of a high school clique these days I’d probably be a nerd. I like Dungeons and Dragons, I like video games and I know how to use big words. Oddly enough, though, these days nerds wear their nerdiness as a badge of pride. After all, the nerds are the ones who are making all the money by building the websites that everyone takes for granted these days. So perhaps it’s not such a bad clique to be a part of.

In some ways, I feel like I missed out a bit by going to a school that didn’t have such clearly-defined subcultures. But then I wonder how accurate the movies really have it, anyway — is it really so obvious from looking at people and observing their attitudes what subculture they belong to?