Subculture and the Meaning of Style

Lecture Notes

Subculture
It is a minority culture that exists within a mainstream culture but deviates from mainstream culture often rejecting or actively rebelling against it's cultural norms and myths.

Internet Culture/Cyberculture

The internet allowed for the merging and meetings of distant subculture and cultures, in fact it would be more accurate to refer to the internet as having its own culture with infinite subcultures of its own. As each subculture has the benefit of being able to hyperspecialize into one field/topic, however a single person who engages with the internet is likely to be in numerous of these subcultures at any given time – be they lurking (present on a forum but not interacting with other users) or engaging with the subculture. Jakub Macek in his 2005 essay attempts to define cyberculture, in which he defines the following cultural narrative themes of cyberculture.

• Technology as agent of change
• Technology and freedom/power/empowerment
• Technology and the formation of the new frontier
• Technology and authenticity

Jakub Macek’s essay “Defining Cyberculture” http://macek.czechian.net/defining_cyberculture.htm
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Internet cultures can be spurred into action however, for instance on April 1st 2017 the website Reddit gave its users a blank canvas of 1000 square pixels and 72 hours to draw on the canvas, but one user could only draw on the canvas every few minutes. This limitation forced groups to work in collaboration to draw what they wanted and then to defend it from other groups/users.  Ultimately three major factions emerged Creators, Protectors and Destroyers.
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Creators – wanting to make evermore complex marks on the canvas
Protectors – Wanting to preserve their favoured marks
Destroyers – A group that wanted to paint the hole canvas black 

The project itself appears to be a reference to the 2005 million-dollar homepage. Due to dimensions and similarity of the chaotic end result.