Digital information technology's impact on rave culture*

Digital information technologies offer liberating, emancipating opportunities for the creation of new communities and spaces where young people can belong, yet they can be constraining and oppressive as well.

Digital information technologies could be considered constraining and oppressive in terms of access and usability, and the broad appeal and reach of digital information technologies has actually been a disadvantage to some cultures in terms of removing exclusivity.

For example, the majority of web content is written in English, which means that users must be literate in the English language, or hope that the website they wish to visit has alternate versions which have been translated into their language. The web also favours fast internet access and users without disabilities, as seen in the design and layout of many popular websites such as YouTube, which is better suited to broadband connections, inaccessible to the blind and does not yet provide captions for the hearing impaired.

To expand on my LJA6 essay on rave culture, digital information technologies have played a part in allowing access to what was once regarded as an ‘underground’ rave scene. The proliferation of change and growth in rave culture has traditionally not been openly accepted by the community itself even prior to digital media, forcing fandom and culture cycles.

With the integration of ‘dance’ music in commercial radio broadcasts, enduring news reports of illegal drug busts, films portraying the subculture, and websites dedicated to advertising rave culture, some aspects of this culture’s entrance into the mainstream, in what was once an “underground, pre-commercialised rave scene” (Siokou & Moore 2008, p. 56), is now regarded with nostalgic mourning by authentic raver identities (Siokou & Moore 2008, p. 56, Brabazon 2002, p.20).

So in a sense, digital information technology has removed the ‘exclusivity’ from what was once an underground practice, much to the dismay of the rave culture’s fandom as this has attracted thousands of punters who didn’t adopt their beliefs and practices, thus mutating the culture.

*Discussion Forum Activity posted on 1st April, 2009 by Maria Tan

CMNS6060 - eCulture and Audiences, The University of Newcastle

Children of the night

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This essay discusses rave culture by describing how a member performs their 'raver' identity online.

Why oh why can’t you just accept it? I’m a raver, not a f***ing drug addict! Yeah that’s right I do Es, I get plastered. Leave me alone, it’s my life, I think it’s sorted (DJ Hixxy & MC Storm, 2001).

Once an ‘underground’ youth subculture of the Gen X and Cold Gen Y age bracket in the 80s and 90s, the electronic music created by digital technologies that spawned the ‘rave’ scene and ‘dance’ culture still continues to assert its influence on youth culture and identity, on a global scale, to the present day.

The fandom created by this rave culture is evident in the continuous evolution of cultural, performative and local dimensions (de Kloet & van Zoonen, 2007) surrounding this rave and club culture community. Centred around a broad classification of ‘dance’ music with its many mutating sub genres, the idolisation of local and international DJs, as well as drugs, jargon, fashion, dance styles, and ideologies; the fans within this community discuss and ascribe to cultural elements which are neither static nor distinct for all ‘ravers’ as “rave, for the majority, is a ‘weekend’ culture of hedonism, sensation and escape” (Goulding et al 2002, p.263) that has now spanned two decades of youthful participation throughout Australia and around the world.

Fans in this community can be actively seen representing their raver identities in the Glowsticking.com (GS.C) website , dedicated to a particular prop used in the performative dance styles of rave culture, called ‘glowsticks’.

GS.C community members construct personalised profiles with the opportunity to blog, link to their existing websites, participate in various forum and chat discussions extending to Twitter and Facebook, and submit articles, photos and videos relating to rave/club culture. This allows the fan to express a representation of their identity online through a variety of textual and audio visual forms with others in the cultural community. For example, in the profile of a senior GS.C member, *+*Beautiful Starlite*+*, she states her interests in the ‘Personal Info’ section using jargon synonymous with rave culture:

Mixing Trance , Music Junkie (I love most EDM Genere's along with other Genere's) [sic], Learning new ways of Freehanding , Living Life To The Fullest, Loving As much As I Can, Laughing Till It Hurts, Smiling, and Just Being Me! P.L.U.R.R .o0o})i({o0o

Within the gallery and article submissions sections, GS.C members are able to upload personally created dancing tutorials, performative audio, videos and photos of themselves, friends and DJs at raves/clubs, and reinforce their online raver identities through attending GS.C’s ‘meet ups’ with others from the community, the outcome of which is documented on the GS.C website through photos and videos further establishing social proof of the community members’ cultural activism.

The online ‘narrative’ space GS.C provides, and the ‘techno’ music central to the performative rave culture are literal examples of how digital technology has shaped youth identity and social practices. This technological acculturation is noted by White & Wyn (2008) of Willis’ (2003) work:

“Young people creatively respond to electronically produced cultural products in ways that surprise their makers, ‘finding meanings and identities never meant to be there’.”

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^[1] Mixing refers to the audio mixing of various sound sources performed by a DJ to produce the effect of a homogenous and undisrupted sequential sound.
^[2] Trance is a sub genre of dance music.
^[3] Freehanding refers to a style of dance using glowsticks.
^[4] P.L.U.R. is an acronym within rave culture that stands for Peace, Love, Unity and Respect.

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Accepting the unaccepted

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An online example of geeks as 'resistance' and 'project' identities based on Castells' theory of the network society which explains how producers use language strategically to invite audience members to collaborate in the cause.

It’s the rise of the token smart guy, coming to a computer screen near you. Nowadays the mass media is saturated with symbols of ‘geekdom’ through tech websites and magazines, sci-fi genres, comic books brought to life, and even infamous hackers and their ‘underground’ society are now frequently portrayed in films and reported in the news. “In a new media environment characterized by sharing and creative repurposing, some fan practices and texts once labeled as ‘geeky’ or ‘nerdy’ seem much less stigmatized” (Tocci 2007, p. 1).

According to Quail (2009), the nerd has been historically constructed as an awkward, math-savvy, social and sexual failure which Konzack (2006, p. 2) dubs as an “intellectual cultural movement”. Drawing from Castells’ (2004, p. 8) identity structures, it would seem that nerds and geeks have formed their own sub culture of ‘networked individualism’ out of resistance and project identities as a defense mechanism from the world that shunned them.

A subset of this intellectual cultural movement would be the ‘hacker’ culture, in the mass media sense of the term, which encompasses the illegal activity of ‘crackers’ and primarily denotes advanced ICT expertise.

One well known hacker within this culture is Eric Steven Raymond (ESR), a writer, IT professional and self professed nerd and geek. On his website , ESR promotes his books, essays and viewpoints including a “HOWTOs” section on “Hacker History and Culture”.

ESR employs many techniques as elements of persuasive ‘techie-oriented’ language in the form of logical arguments and even humour found in his “Rootless Root” eastern philosophical parody of hacker culture. An authoritative voice is prominent throughout his website, using pronoun language to address the audience as though in direct conversation. For example, on his “In Case You Care” page, ESR writes: “If you are a really serious geek, you probably want to know about my home hardware.”

In ESR’s guide on “How to Become a Hacker”, rules of the hacker culture are outlined for the audience. From the outset, the audience is introduced to ESR as the “editor of the Jargon File” and other “well known documents” implying authority, and even social proof by saying, “I often get email requests from enthusiastic network newbies”. The audience is also appealed to emotionally through the semiotic “geek” and “nerd” identifiers, as ESR asserts in “The Hacker/Nerd Connection: Being something of a social outcast helps you stay concentrated on the really important things, like thinking and hacking”. The reason why these identifiers connect with the inscribed reader is interpreted by Scott (n.d.) as a “deviant (or moral) career”:

Stigmatising labels are hugely powerful in shaping our sense of who we are in relation to significant others and to the wider society, and so a moral career can be one of the most defining influences upon self identity.

Although nerds and geeks have formed resistance and project identities in response to being social outcasts, they have also developed into legitimizing identities (e.g. Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak), whose complementary influence has become ever pervasive in modern society. Kendall (1999, p. 8) relates this to the ‘revenge of the nerds’: “Money confers status in the USA, and business and monetary success confer masculinity. Hence the ‘revenge’ of this previously non-hegemonic group."

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