Welcome to Subcultures in the Digital Age

Greetings and salutations students and friends. According to the description above this is a blog written by an anthropology class.

According to the picture above it must be true! After the jump I'll introduce myself, the instructor, and the class idea for Anthro 302: Subcultures in the Digital Age!

So now that I have enticed you past the jump, let me tell you a bit about myself. My big research projects include work on WoW and the Taiwanese video game industry. While in Taiwan I also worked as a consultant for an educational game company, doing all sorts of random tasks including creating curriculum, writing stories, editing quests, and more. Smaller projects I have done during my student career include papers on the destruction of a FFXI guild, identity in anime, and the imagining of America, just to mention a few (that happen to be relevant to this class).

In addition to studying geeks, I am one. I cosplay, play GW2 among other games, read and write for pleasure as well as for academia. I watch anime and read comic books in Chinese in lieu of using flashcards. When I am not busy teaching I also record 3 shows with TPN - including Sci-Fi Science for which I am the host. I also blog, though ironically, I don't keep it as updated as I should. No one is perfect after all. 

This class is divided into 3 main themes: Living (creating digital content, online  dating) Dreaming (Trekkies, Hackers, Anime/comics, Steampunk) and Playing (gamers - digital and tabletop, cosplay, geek bars). At the end of each theme we have a "theory wrap-up" to bring together all of the topics covered. 

Posts to this blog are mandatory and can be expected, from students, every Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday by midnight. (Assuming timeliness - of course - I make no guarantees.) I may also periodically post as well as invite guest posters. (I have 2 guest posters lined up so far. Anyone else interested should contact me privately.)

So the next big question is probably why am I doing this. As I wrote on my syllabus,  

Due to its history of immigration and emphasis on individuality, the USA is more overtly and self-consciously diverse than many other parts of the world. Even so, there is still a sense of mainstream culture, be it national, regional, religious, or popular, however complex and provisional. While this mainstream culture provides a sense of identity for many, it does not appeal to everyone, and a myriad of subcultures flourish. With digitally networked technologies constituting a ubiquitous part of life for many Americans, explicitly or implicitly, the bar for access to many of these groups has lowered. This does not mean, however, that all of these subcultures are broadly accepted, as many of them are deeply misunderstood by outsiders. This misunderstanding has lead to friction, fear, and bullying just to name a few of the problems faced by group members, particularly in certain regions (as Mary Gray explored in her book Out in the Country). The technologies of the digital age have drastically changed the way many of these groups appear to both insiders and outsiders, and have contributed to the formation of new groups. This course aims to shed light on these activities, both to increase our understanding of them on their own terms but also to increase our understanding of culture writ large. In the process, we often find that the marginal is not as new or alien as it may first appear.

And I am having this play out in a blog because blogs are a part of digital media which is an increasingly important part of our world - used by newscasters, academics, politicians, students, and so many more. Anyone can start one and so there are thousands, yet not all are of equal quality. Despite a generation of "digital natives" the internet is still replete with examples of people getting into trouble because of what they post, and becoming misinformed because of what they read. This assignment is an attempt to move classroom assignments from papers (which for the record I think are very important, but are being covered in most other classes) to the more immediately useful skill of online writing (which most people are doing anyway). In addition to the practice of writing for an audience that will be more than just the teacher (which I hope will translate into an overall improvement of proofreading before submission) the students will also be required to critically read and comment on this blog - and I will not be editing posts! Just because it was published online (or otherwise) doesn't make it true, but that doesn't mean everything online should be summarily dismissed. Critically examining digital information will be an ongoing theme throughout the class as we level our up through the semester. 

 Editors Note - This post was originally published on January 24, 2015. As this intro is as much for my incoming students as it is for the public I will be updating this post at the beginning of each semester that I teach this class (usually Spring).