- Acknowledgements Page -

 

© 2006 Andrew McQuade

 

 

 Part One

 

Introductions and Theoretical Concepts

 

GENRE AND THE AUDIENCE: PRODUCER, TEXT, RECEIVER

 

The idea for this research project began when I read Rick Altman’s Film/Genre some years ago. In his book, Altman gives a highly comprehensive insight into the concept of genre in relation to film. He traces the concept of ‘genre’ back to pre-literature and attempts to give an overview of the evolution of the concept, ultimately leading to our current understandings of the term. Chiefly, he examines the institutional requirements and benefits of ‘genre’ as a marketing tool, and in particular the role critics play in shaping genres over time. For Altman, genres are chimera entities, forever going through a process of commercial recycling.

 

Altman’s book raises the question, ‘if a genre cannot be said to be an objective construct, rather a complex social construct that occurs over time, how can it possibly be useful to commercial investors let alone scholars?’ Wouldn’t producers logically prefer to invest in ‘solid’, ‘dependable’ and ‘objective’ projects rather than some obscure pro-morphic entity? Whilst scholars have celebrated poly-generic texts, from various theoretical perspectives, this has often led to a lack of concern towards a text’s institutional requirements. For example, a film may be abound with elements of genre mixing, which may receive artistic praise from scholars using auteur theory, however, we must bare in mind that any ‘artistic’ auteur still has to fit industry standards. They still have to make money and work as part of a huge team, through the many stages of production.

 

In Altman’s view, the role of the critic is to shape the way genres are received, for it is their ‘enlightened’ perspective on a film’s ‘objective properties’ that ultimately prepares, or suggests, interpretative viewing strategies for the consumer. For Altman, genre today is a constant reinvention process, where ideas are recycled rather than an invented (Altman, 1999: 34), but he does not comment on how this affects the interpretational strategies of the folk consumers.

 

Altman deals with the ‘film’ in Film/Genre more than the ‘genre’. This made me wonder, if we take Altman’s ideas to another medium; are the roles of industry and critic so pronounced, and do they function in the same way? The critic and the marketers may shape the discursive framework by which generic texts appear in the public sphere to an extent, but what input does the consumer have and what of a text’s creators? Are they no more than names on a poster, dehumanised into nothing more than figments of some capitalist agenda? Altman employs no audience research to give insight into their particular input into ‘the genre game’. Rather, they are there, by implication only, to consume both the text (as supplied by the producer) and the context (as decreed by the critic and marketing forces). Altman neglects, as does so much genre theory, the vernacular. The day-to-day folk who consume texts, their vernacular theories about them and practices of consumption, are ignored and the relationship of these folk to a film’s producers is textual at best.

 

Thomas McLaughlin parallels vernacular theories to Foucault’s “subjugated knowledges,” those knowledge types that are subject specific, but not to the established standards of the hegemony (McLaughlin, 1996: 7). Not only are the folk consumers ignored though in Altman’s theory, I would argue that the producer of a text has become naught but a dehumanised industrial construct. The vernacular does not apply solely to audiences, as subjugated knowledge types occur everywhere in our society, including producers. McLaughlin calls this particular knowledge ‘insider theory’ (McLaughlin, 1996: 102).

 

Why should any of this be of interest? Within popular music, the grunge movement appeared in the late eighties in stark contrast to ‘poodle hair rock’ which dominated the mainstream at the time. We can surmise, or theorise as some academics have mislabelled it, that grunge’s popularity was due to its counter-mainstream aesthetics, but without being within the musical culture of the time, we can do no more than surmise. We need to understand the consumer viewpoint from within, to find out why it is that such seemingly random genres appear from out of nowhere and find success, but we also need to understand the perspectives of such bands themselves.

 

Ethnography has proved a popular method of scholarly enquiry when investigating culture and sub-cultures of all types. A record company’s sales statistics may give a quantitative indication of what is popular, but they can never explain why. Karen Halnon, in ‘Inside Shock Music Carnival: Spectacle As Contested Terrain’, uses multi-textual ethnography as a means to discover what the music of ‘carnivalesque bands’ such as Slipknot and Insane Clown Posse mean to the fans themselves, and how such music is important in their every day lives and is important in their formulation of self identity through ‘commodified rebellion’(Halnon, 2003: 774). Importantly, Halnon’s investigation is one that uses interview excerpts to back up her claims, not just random theorising. The every day meanings within a culture, such as the ones Halnon investigates, is something ethnography seeks to understand. For Spradley:

 

The essential core of ethnography is this concern with the meaning of actions and events to the people we seek to understand. Some of these meanings are directly expressed in language; many are taken for granted and communicated only indirectly through word and action. But in every society people make constant use of these complex meaning systems to organise their behaviour, to understand themselves and others, and to make sense out of the world in which they live. These systems of meaning constitute their culture; ethnography always implies a theory of culture (Spradley, 1979: 5).

 

Halnon, a fan of many of the bands whose culture she investigates, uses excerpts of bands’ lyrics to demonstrate how they allow fans to identify with a band, which helps in the fan’s formation of self identity. She validates this against interviews with several concert goers at ‘carnivalesque’ music festivals. However, by only examining the thoughts of festival participants, that suggest the musical performers themselves are mere textual facilitators. They are almost culturally extradited as human beings, representing only ideologies through ‘spectacle’ (Halnon, 2003: 751 – 753). This is a problem that needs addressing. Referring to online fan groups, Nancy Baym notes that “[s]cholarship so far has barely scratched the surface of the interplays between media producers and online fans” (Baym, 2003: 247). Jenkins suggests that “[r]ather than talking about interactive technologies, we should document the interactions that occur amongst media consumers, between media consumer and media texts, and between media consumer and media producers” (Jenkins: n.d.) As such, this Dissertation asks ‘what can be learned by looking at producer/consumer relations in cyberspace?’

 

Reception studies emerged partially as a reaction against dominant forms of textual analysis, where the scholar’s enlightened wisdom would unlock the hidden meanings of a text. By placing the emphasis less on the texts ‘intrinsic properties’ and more on the marketing of texts and what texts mean to audiences, a greater level of meaning could theoretically be unlocked which was not subjective solely to the scholars’ interpretation (Staiger, 2005: 3). However, this shift in emphasis occurs for reasons of practicality also, which are seldom admitted. A scholar investigating the release of War Of The Worlds (Spielberg, 2005) cannot just call up the director and ask him questions about the texts production. As such, scholars practising Reception theory, such as outlined in Staiger’s Media Reception Studies, can only examine the last few parts of the chain. This has led them to imply the needs of the textual producer without any verification at all, just as textual analysts fail to verify their claims with actual audiences. We need to look at both producers and consumers to readdress the balance.

 

The problem with such a proposition is the amount of variables it requires the researcher to be in control of. It requires the researcher to be present at the birth of a new stylistic genre movement, to be able to integrate into the culture surrounding it, and to be able to research it competently by having access to text, consumer, and producer. Luckily, I am in such a position. The Swedish band Machinae Supremacy (or ‘MaSu’ as abbreviated by their fans, hence the term I shall use) achieved great success at an underground level in the five years since they started making music. They produce a style of music that is recognisably rock orientated, but distinctly different from other styles in either the mainstream or the underground, incorporating musical influences primarily from computer games.[1] I do not claim their music is unique from a musical theorist’s perspective, and I should stress that my theoretical background is not within this field. This claim I make from my own vernacular knowledge of rock/metal culture, but as I hope to demonstrate later in my research, this view is more than verified by other members of MaSu’s fanbase. I wanted to find out how and why a band that plays a style so generically unlike other bands has gained a loyal fanbase, by examining the producer/consumer relationship, shifting the emphasis away from the textual elements except where referred to in producer/consumer discussion.

 

With so many independent musicians, film makers, and other artists turning to the Internet to express their creativity, I hope my research will be able to demonstrate how artists can be successful independently in new media environments, and that aesthetic conformity to the standards of the industry need not be a pre-requisite. Such research then, is of more than just academic importance.

 

My Dissertation is split into three key sections:

 

1. In part one, an overview of various theoretical issues which first need to be addressed.
2. In part two, I will consider the results of the ethnographic part of my investigation. Using virtual ethnography (sometimes referred to as ‘cyber ethnography’). The object being to understand the band’s reception by looking at producer/consumer interaction.
3. In part three, my conclusion will highlight what has been learnt by ethnographically looking at online producer/consumer relations.

 

ETHNOGRAPHIC BOUNDARIES, ETHICAL ISSUES, ONLINE SOCIAL HEIRARCHY AND ‘HCMC’

 

What makes MaSu so accessible to an Audience and Reception Studies scholar is their almost exclusive online marketing. The band have made hundreds of free mp3’s available on the Internet, done online interviews, participated in IRC[2] sessions, and they host their own forum where they interact with their growing global fan base. They have openly allowed fan production including desktop wallpapers and song remixes. They engage in discussions with their fans on a wide variety of topics not always musically related. With the Internet so vital to the band’s reception, they are a highly practical research entity. As Christine Hine suggests:

 

The ethnography of the Internet does not necessarily involve physical travel. Visiting the Internet focuses on experiential rather than physical displacement. (Hine, 2000: 46)

 

As a researcher I can access the majority of the band’s musical texts legally via mp3, and view/participate in social interactions, on the official forum. The MaSu official forum allows for a culturally specific understanding of both sides of textual divide.

 

A forum is a place online where end-users can post comments on topics of their choice in a ‘thread’. A forum is usually designated to one parent topic, with several sub-sections discussing various areas of said topic. Once an end-user has navigated their way to the sub-section of their choice, they can create individual threads or post in existing ones. In a thread, other end-users can then add their own comments, taking discussion into directions that can sometimes be far removed from the initial subject. Discussions on a forum differ from ‘live’ chat rooms using JAVA script, in that forum discussions are always turn based and do not allow for real-time video/audio conferencing. Some forums allow for anonymous posting, but on MaSu’s forum, all end-users have to sign a ‘terms of agreement’ declaration before joining, to make them members of this ‘virtual community’. Virtual Communities, according to Howard Rheingold, the inventor of the term, are “social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on public discussions enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace” (Rheingold, 1993: 5). As such, I am working from the concept of the likes of Anderson, that communities do not require face-to-face, or rather body-to-body interactions. Communities exist in the conscious, rather than the physical (Anderson, 1983: 18).

 

Much of the issue’s around Internet research ethicality centre around the ‘Internet as public versus private zone’ debate. The forum is a public zone and all chat that occurs on there can be considered ethically researchable, based on the fact that end-users can choose to send private messages to each other, which are not viewable by the public. This means that whilst some data is always concealed from the ethnographer, since this data is sent privately, it would not be ethically researchable anyway (Stern, 2003: 251). I have divulged some private messages addressed to me during this research, because they were at my liberty to reveal and did not contain anything incriminating about the end-user who had sent it to me. It is impossible to provide citations for these comments as they are only accessible from my personal log-in, but in orally based ethnography such citations are rarely available at all, beyond the word of the scholar.

 

Whilst not all forums are designed for leisure purposes, in the case of the MaSu forum, this cyber-environment fits Radway’s description of the ‘leisure world’, being “conceptualized as sites for the pursuit of what are still referred to as ‘merely’ hobbies or avocations, they are increasingly and ironically the very realms in which individuals invest most of their energy, money, and time” (Radway, 1988: 370). Building on the concept of the Internet as hyper-real, or hyper-textual, environment (Livingstone, 2004: 80), we can see forums as ‘hyper-leisure worlds.’ Because of MaSu’s presence on the forum, these leisure worlds can also been seen as the site of producer/consumer vernacular relations. Radway seems to hint at the significance of this in the closing of her essay, when she questions “perhaps it might also be possible to identify together those points where articulations and alliances could be forced across the borders in the service of a future not yet envisioned and therefore neither necessarily lost nor secured” (Radway, 1988: 374).

 

Dennis Waskul and Michael Douglas, in ‘Cyber-self: The Emergence of The Self in On-line Chat’ use the term ‘cyberself’ to refer to the self identity of the end-user and suggest that “a cyberself is always whatever is passing for a self at the moment in an electronic-computer-mediated context” (Waskul & Douglas, 1997: 375) From a research ethics point of view, end-user anonymity is of vital importance. Were it possible to trace an end-user’s comment to their location in the offline world, an ethnographic investigation such as mine could not take place. Fortunately, the IP address of an end-user’s computer is not accessible to other end-users on the forum. End-users are in control of how much information they reveal about their ‘real identity’, and any incriminating information I have not included in this paper. I do not regard any of my research as harmful, nor would I conduct it if it was, thus the ethical issue of dishonesty/harm is not present. I made end-users on the forum aware that I was in the process of writing this paper.

 

A ‘moderator’ is an end-user selected because they appear to be capable of holding a responsible position, and who is entrusted with more power than standard end-users. Such powers may include the right to close threads indefinitely (‘locking’), censor comments, and even ban users if comments are derogatory or discriminatory. Depending on how strict a forum is, moderators can also make sure discussions do not stray from the initial thread topic. In this respect, they direct the flow of end-user exchange to a degree.

 

All forums then, have power relations and social hierarchies like in the ‘real world’, however they are not necessarily alike the ones in the real world. Within virtual ethnography, traditional social norms become contorted and the participant/observer duality becomes much more confusing as the line between reality and hyper-reality becomes increasingly blurred. An end-user can be logged in for hours and never make a single comment, thus being present within the folk group of the forum, but not contributing to human computer mediated communication (HCMC)[3]. This is known as ‘lurking’.

 

It is arguable that simply by the scholars presence, he or she is contorting the social world, so as to create records that do not capture the ‘natural cultural environment’. ‘Lurking’, if we follow said logic, is a method by which to observe social interaction without such ‘contamination’. I take issue with the notion that there can ever be such a thing as ‘naturally occurring’, or ‘intervention free’ data. Not only is the word ‘natural’ extremely ambiguous and wrapped in ideological assumptions, but in my instance, I have been a member of MaSu’s forum long before I began writing this Dissertation. For me to not be interacting on the forum would be equally corruptive to the so-called ‘natural order’. Ethnographically speaking, to extradite myself experientially from social interaction would be to not fully capture the vernacular meanings of a culture, which would be methodologically un-sound.

 

Henry Jenkins’ investigation into the alt.tv.twinpeaks newsgroup is one of the pioneering investigations into online fan culture and consequentially HCMC. In his piece, Jenkins focuses on the HCMC elements most akin to normal talk though. That is to say, text is just seen as text, with little mention of the way text is contextually altered by the advent of the Internet. Nonetheless, his investigation has been particularly influential for me, in the way he picks out key motivating themes and ideas that appeared in the HCMC he observed. In his work, some end-users suspected that Twin Peaks creator David Lynch was present on the newsgroup and trying to mislead them (Jenkins, 1995: 59). Here the producer/consumer relationship is implicitly acknowledged. In my research, it is explicit by virtue of the fact that MaSu themselves are active members of their forum.

 

The problem with ‘text centric’ interpretations of HCMC is that, like in discourse analysis, the visual cues are filtered out. Whilst an end-user is never aware of other end-users facial expressions like in oral communication, words accented or written in capitals take on different meanings online. In addition, forum avatars[4], signatures[5], use of visuals and sound are all elements contributing to HCMC and an end-users online identity. The semantic dimension of HCMC is not the same as in the ‘real world’ and an online ethnographer must be aware of this. Virtual ethnography is about more than just simulacrums of ‘real’ language.

 

I do not wish to suggest that MaSu are not discussed elsewhere on the Internet besides their forum as they are discussed on other forums relating to the rock/metal spectrum as well as forum relating to gaming culture too. However, the potential number of sites hosting HCMC discussions exceed the thousands, and it is virtually impossible to find the online locations in which the band have been discussed. Ultimately though, their official forum is the only place I can research producer/consumer HCMC exchange. My research into MaSu often led me to look at other related websites cited by the folk of the forum. I do not see this as transgressing the ethnographic boundaries I have placed, by researching outside the forum. Rather, in viewing other MaSu related sites, such as their unofficial FAQ, I am participating in an activity shared by other members of the online community.

 

I already have a certain level of vernacular knowledge of what it means to be a MaSu fan and there is a danger of taking for granted issues which should be subjected to ethnographic scrutiny because of this. However, I believe my vernacular knowledge about MaSu means I have less gratuitous amounts of new information to take in, compared to someone completely alien to the band. A major benefit of the ethnographic approach is that it removes the ‘clinical’ nature of the focus group and provides greater potential for the scholar to be genuinely immersed in a cultural environment, rather than moderating a discussion from some mythic ivory tower of academia. Whilst it is theoretically possible to use a forum as an online focus group, this requires the scholar to behold the power of moderation, thus drastically altering social hierarchy. The results is that a focus group can certainly examine the vernacular, but it cannot experience it. To understand a culture from within, it is necessary for the scholar to be on the same level as the folk. Schrøder et al, in Researching Audiences summarise the Malinowskian position that:

 

[T]he ethnographer should study culture not just from a bottom-up perspective, but from an insider’s perspective, an aim that demands committed, long-term immersion into a setting in order to understand how meaning is achieved and attained. Moreover, the ethnographer should study culture from a holistic perspective (‘his world’), an aim that demands equally committed analysis of multiple view and often contradictory sources in order to understand how meaning is constituted as contextualised practices (Schrøder, 2003: 65).

 

As such, we gain more from seeing the producer/consumer interaction as being from different sources within the same cultural sphere, rather than intrinsically oppositional. This pre-determined opposition between fans and producers, as seen in other work on fan culture, I take issue with. I will outline why in the next section…

 

HENRY JENKINS, THE GUERILLA AUDIENCE, AND THE POST-MODERN VISION OF ‘THE INSTITUTION’

 

Be it a ‘dot com’ mogul, record producer, or a film company; in all such instances the ‘producer’ is usually seen from a perspective that projects the image of the greedy capitalist producer who relates to the consumer only as a human embodiment of financial capital.

 

An example of the ‘producer versus consumer’ relationship is echoed in the work of Jenkins, who in Textual Poachers, brings up this issue in his in-depth discussion Star Trek fans and their production of ‘filk’ texts, noting how fans rebuke established power relations in producing their own fan-fiction. Employing DeCertauian ‘tactics’ (as opposed to the ‘strategies’ of the empowered institutions), fans produce texts that develop ideas and character relationships not seen in the TV show (Jenkins, 1992: 33). These fans selectively poach from official texts to satiate their own needs. Jenkins’ view of the producer/consumer relationship is a step up from the factory worker being exploited by the corporate ala Marx, but Jenkins still sees the fans relationship to the producer as defined by resistance to the hegemony (Jenkins, 1992: 40).

 

Barker, in Knowing Audiences: Judge Dredd, speaking of pre-deterministic social research, notes that “[t]here was research which seemed to show that witchcraft existed, and which had powerful effects – but in the eyes of those who scorned and attacked it, that was because it was so designed that it was bound to find ‘witches’”(Barker, 1998: 84). By selectively looking for information with a set interpretative strategy at the ready, witchfinder generals parallel some academic researchers more often than we would like to admit. Whilst Jenkins’ insights are valuable, and may well be correct in regard to the fan group he investigated, he is guilty of never looking at the other side of the textual wall. By seeing the producer/consumer as two entirely segregate entities operating within the same sub-culture but diametrically opposed to one another, a relationship is imposed on them, which has resulted in a producer/consumer relationship within fan studies as being pre-determinately hostile. Radway seems to advocate readdressing this balance throughout her essay ‘Reception Study: Ethnography and The Problems with Dispersed and Nomadic Audiences’, stressing the need to examine producer/consumer relations, noting that “[t]o think of someone as a listener or receiver in an audience, obviously, we must first assume the existence of the speaker/producer” (Radway, 1988: 361). More importantly, that; “the words separating ‘us’ from ‘them’ are not natural boundaries, but social borders of our own making” (Radway, 1988: 374). However, as she further outlines her research proposal, it appears that she too predetermines the producer/consumer relationship from the outset:

 

I suggest a study of the production of popular culture within the everyday as a way of trying to understand how social subjects are at once hailed unsuccessfully by dominant discourses and therefore dominated by them and yet manage to adapt them to their own other, multiple purposes and even to resist or contest them [my italics] (Radway, 1988: 368).

 

Whilst I am not attempting to discredit the work of those theorists who have looked at how audiences reject ‘hegemonic meanings’, I would argue that the issue of ‘meaning’ itself has become less a case of semantic interpretation, more a case of semantic war. The work of Fiske has been particularly influential in advocating this perspective, but as Dhalgren notes “he makes too much of the ‘resistance’ to hegemony that alternative interpretation of popular programmes might entail” (Dhalgren, 1998: 300). Further noting that “[O]ne’s point of departure and interests shape to some extent the notion of ‘audiences’, and one thus conceptualizes ‘audiences’ within particular discursive settings” (Dahlgren, 1998: 307). I would suggest that the language of warfare, epitomised by the likes of DeCerteau’s ‘Guerilla viewer’, does not generally reflect fan culture from a fan’s, or even producer’s, point of view.

 

Textual Poachers drastically changed previous academic preconceptions that fans were nothing but passive, if slightly quirky, textual consumers. However, the dualistic division between Star Trek’s producers and its fans, as Jenkins sets them up, puts them in opposition to the extent that one would almost be inclined to believe the makers of a show like Star Trek had no interest in the show at all. In seeing fans as passionate, intelligent, and committed, the producer, by contrast, has become a tyrant. There are several possible reasons for this, and I would suggest that the main one is the dominant modernist perception of the institution. The producer/fan oppositional relationship is essentially a modernist construct. With modernisms need for hierarchies, social order, definable boundaries, constant and objective segregation, a producer/consumer relationship characterised by conflict does not seem an unlikely outcome. The reason being, that the ‘organisation’ is so vast, so concerned with its own structure and segregation, that the consumer can only exist as a commercial statistic (Styhre, 2001).

 

Styhre, in ‘Nomadic Organization: The Post-modern Organization of Becoming’, discusses the ‘nomadic organisation’ as one that is constantly on the move, always seeking to branch outwards, not constricted by boundaries, and, perhaps most importantly, where the boundaries between the internal and external become blurred. As he notes:

 

In a post-modern capitalism, there are nothing but fluxes, breaks, changes, and bifurcations; the organization thus becomes an open system with close relations with the environment. The boundaries between inside and outside are continuously transgressed. As a consequence, a pluralist epistemology of becoming is needed, an epistemology that acknowledges a polyvocal and polysemiotic view on the organization (Styhre, 2001).

 

Whilst I would not go as far as to call MaSu a ‘nomadic organisation’, there are clear benefits to Styhre’s model. In such a model, the producer and the consumer are no longer at war on the battlefield of textual production/consumption. The Internet has forced scholarly redefinition of social boundaries and problematises modernist notions of segregation, with its blurring of real and hyper-real environments (Waskul & Douglas, 1997: 378 – 379). It openly allows for such a post-modern view of the organisation. Whilst Styhre still seems more concerned with the modernist view of the ‘mammoth organisation’ in his piece, he at least affords the potentiality to see the organisation as something other than Godzilla-like. The institution can conceivably be a ‘local’ phenomenon. With the fan already established as an example of Foucault’s ‘localised power’ or Tulloch’s ‘powerless elite’, we can now see the creator of a text and the fan as compatible entities, with the producer not necessarily exclusively segregated by capitalist prerogatives as he/she/they sit in a gigantic skyscraper.

 

Even with Styhre’s model, it would be foolish to suggest Jenkins’ research and mine are directly comparable for there is a big difference in scale. Star Trek is a mammoth enterprise with directors, writers, producers, marketing people, and Paramount Pictures executives all involved in the process of turning the Star Trek name into profit. It fits the modernist model perfectly. MaSu, conversely, sell all their own merchandise through their own label ‘Hubnester Industries’, accessible online. They are textual producers, performers, money men, a rock band and rock fans all at the same time. This is not to suggest hierarchy is suddenly extinct in the world of MaSu, but it does not exist exactly like in Jenkins’ example. MaSu are subject to copyright just as much as Star Trek, but we need to conceive the potentiality of a producer/consumer relationship that can be more intimate, a horizontal relationship as well as vertical, not just the latter.

 

Critics of this position would no doubt point out that an intimate producer/consumer relationship is farcical, an illusion brought about by the identity of the ‘end user’ within new media. It is capitalist greed under a newer, more technologically friendly guise, fooling end-users into thinking they have more power than they do (Weinstein & Weinstein, 2000: 200). Within the technocapitalist model of Best and Kellner, such a position is certainly viable. In their model, the Internet allows the previously impossible potential for unlimited and rapid trade (Best & Kellner, 1997: 58). The producer/consumer relationship is defined by low cost production, but high financial intake at unprecedented speed (Styhre, 2001). The model suggests rapid-fire capitalism is the sole benefit of new communication technologies, with the distance between producer and consumer kept the same as in other traditional modernist models. It does not consider that new technologies bring greater communicative discourse into play, in addition to faster exchange of commodities. It has almost become second nature to see a capitalist model as being devoid of human interaction at all, let alone a realm in which the term ‘vernacular’ seems applicable.

 

Whilst it may be true that categories like ‘producer’ and ‘audience’ are created through the process of production/consumption (Hine, 2000: 38), within different theoretical discourses, these can carry very different meanings. The ‘producer’, the ‘industry’, the ‘institution’, and the ‘organisation’ all carries the image of some mammoth, almost mythic, monster whose appetite for consumer exploitation is insatiable. Whilst audiences have long since been liberated of their damaging image as mere passive mass consumers of texts, the producer is still a very ambiguous term, and one that nonetheless carries predominantly negative connotations, particularly to those with Marxist leanings. For the purpose of this Dissertation, let us see the following terms defined as overleaf:

 

·        The producer from here on refers to the textual producer. In the case of MaSu, they are their own marketing force, musical performers, moneymen, and function in several other roles. The producer here encompasses all these.

·        The end-user is a particular type of audience which should not be confused with the ‘mass’ television audience, nor should it be confused with the individual novel reader (Livingstone, 2004: 75 – 77). Where forums are concerned, the end-user is an active participant in the creation of a textual world. There is no passive end-user, for even the ‘lurker’ practises computer mediated interaction of a kind. It differs from previous notions of the audience in that whilst the end-user is situated within the ‘real’ offline, he/she appears online as a simulacrum of the ‘real self’ within the hyper-real environment of the Internet (Waskul & Douglas, 1997: 380).

 

Having established the necessity for an ethnographic approach, the following issues need to be investigated by looking at the MaSu community as a whole, not treating producers and consumers as separate social entities within one virtual setting:

 

1.      How important is the forum in establishing and maintaining producer/consumer relations?

2.      What vernacular discourses mediate on such forums and how are they maintained?

3.      What is the significance of ‘genre’ as a discourse?

4.      What are the etic/emic qualities within the MaSu online community?

5.      How does talk around the discursive object (the band) function within the forum environment, how are opinions expressed, and what areas are taboo?

6.      What social hierarchies are observed and how do/don’t these differ between producer and consumer?

 

Within any research practise, the position of the scholar is one that inevitably affects results. Even those scholars who insist absolute objectivity is attainable would admit the presence of the researcher always has a bearing on what is being researched. For a scholar participating in an ethnographic study of fan culture, the issue of being too immersed or too close to the discursive object is a problem often debated. In the next section, I will discuss where I position myself within the fan/scholar debate, my relationship to the band, and what I see can be gained from this.

 

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY or THE FAN/SCHOLAR, THE SCHOLAR/FAN, AND THE POST-GRADUATE SOMEWHERE IN THE MIDDLE

 

In participant observation, the dangers of being too close to the research object mean that research could be flawed if the scholar is not able to mediate between participating in a cultural setting and observing it to the correct degree. Where the ‘correct degree’ is exactly, is of course subjective and appropriate to the uniqueness of each cultural encounter. Ethnography complicates this even further, by requiring the scholar to see things through the eyes of cultural participants themselves. It incorporates an experiential dimension to the proceedings, which is an integral part of meaning making. When studying a fan culture, there is the added problem of the scholar already having personal investments in the object of study and even pre-existing investments in the culture being studied. I hold no delusions that I am exempt from these issues and thus need to address them, my place within the scholar/fan dualistic argument, and my views on what Matt Hills refers to as the inevitable ‘imagined subjectivity’ a scholar in this situation faces (Hills, 2002: 3).

 

For Hills, the fan/scholar dynamic is one characterised by a dualism that is not clear-cut. Where most scholars perceive this dualistic divide purely from the academic perspective, Hills suggests that fans too are aware of the divide, which leads many fans to be sceptical and even cynical of academia. For Hills “[s]uch marginalisation would suggest that fandom and academia are co-produced as exclusive social and cultural positions” (Hills, 2002: 2). On both sides of the divide operates an ‘imagined subjectivity’.

 

For the scholar “[i]magined subjectivity, we might say, attributes valued traits of the subject ‘duly trained and informed’ only to those within the given community, while denigrating or devaluing the ‘improper’ subjectivity of those who are outside the community (Hills, 2002: 3). But as he notes, this devotion to rationality and persuasion is contradicted by the multitude of opposing positions taken with academia. Meanwhile, the fans ‘imagined subjectivity’ places him/her in a position where he/she cannot account for his/her devotion to whatever the object of their fandom is (Hills, 2002: 7). Such skills are only possessed by the ‘good’ academic. I would suggest it is a gross estimation to perceive fans are incapable of accounting for their devotion to a text, or that academics are always able to articulate their pop-cultural investments with critical distance. This implies all Academics have the ‘skills’ of those operating specifically within the social sciences, which is not true.

 

McLaughlin in Street Smarts And Critical Theory notes that fans often theorise in the same ways as academics (McLaughlin, 1996: 6), but in a different cultural environment, with what could be described, by the likes of Hills, as ‘different tools of subjectivity’ to the scholar. Hills takes this a step further, suggesting academic criticism can appear in fan discussions in the character of the fan-scholar.

 

Hills’ comments on Steven Frith’s important 1992 distinction between the ‘intellectual’ and the ‘academic’, identifying that whilst Frith suggests a distinction between the two, he in fact uses the terms interchangeably (Hills, 2002: 6). However at the same time there is ambiguity in Hills’ writings as to what ‘scholar’ means, versus ‘academic’. Within either fan-scholar discourse or scholar-fan discourse, these lexemes seem to take on different meanings. ‘Scholar’, in my understanding, refers to anyone using academic theory. Within ‘fan-scholar’ discourse, these are often ‘elites’ within fan culture. The ‘academic’ is defined by a purely institutional position. As Hills notes though, both groups share the same traits, the primary noun in the set defines the social discourse by which action follows. For example, the academic-fan will not use the same language in a lecture as a fan-scholar at a fanzine convention (Hills, 2002: 20).

 

Hills finds it inevitable that fans and academics oppose each other, because of the academic’s need to ‘translate’ vernacular theory into ‘proper’ theory. There is a gap here however. Though Hills acknowledges there are fans who use academic theory, many of them being ex-media studies for example (Hills, 2002: 18), he makes no mention of where the undergraduate or postgraduate student fits in to his work. Are these no more than fan-scholars simply because they do not work full time in an academic institution? If the issue is not of knowledge, but of social discourse, as is the running theme in Hills’ argument, this cannot be so. The ‘student’ is a different social discourse to the ‘academic’, which is different to the ‘fan’.

 

During my time on MaSu’s forum, I found that I was one of many students (albeit the only one actively researching MaSu). The fans did not ‘other’ me, or become intimidated by my academic prerogatives, as Hills argues they are pre-determined to do. Rather, in cases, they were enthused about my research and often wanted to know more about it. The label of ‘student’ is different to the label of ‘academic’. It affords the potentiality of an academic intellectual capacity, but without being institutionalised. This affords me a greater level of mediation between scholarly and fan prerogatives, for I am neither of these full time and am subject to the corresponding associated social discourses only as and when required. Whilst Hills is right to point out that vernacular knowledge needs to go through a process of ‘translation’ to be useful within an academic context, his argument that you are one or the other, with only an imagined subjectivity as catalyst between the two, is uneven and I would suggest that attempting to fit everything within a model of dualism is an inefficient academic explanatory strategy.

 

This Dissertation is not a fan study. Fans are but one particular social identity present on the MaSu official forum, with a whole set of other identities, with complex social relations, integral to the community. These dynamics, amongst many other topics, I explain in Part Two.

 

 

 

Part Two

 

An Ethnographic Investigation of ‘forum.machinaesupremacy.com’

 

INTRODUCING ‘forum.machinaesupremacy.com’

 

When practising virtual ethnography, one needs to first decide whether one is investigating the social interactions conducted on the Internet directly, or the way in which social mediations made practical by the technological advances of the medium itself. The study of interaction between human and machine is termed ‘cyborg anthropology’ by David Thomas, which can include interactions with other humans when mediated through computers, but the emphasis is on human/machine relations directly (Escobar, 2000: 62). Whilst this Dissertation is concerned with more anthropocentric interactions, issues of medium and environment do need to be addressed. Before I can discuss the producer/consumer dynamic of the forum, and the presence of genre discourse therein, we first need to look at issues such as:

 

• How the Internet changes social hierarchical formation processes.
• How the social relations on MaSu forum require us to reconceptualise the producer/fan dynamic.
•  What forms of knowledge are culturally specific to the MaSu forum.

 

From there we can address the issues I put forward in Part One of this Dissertation. I have devoted a section of Part Two to each of these issues.

 

Throughout this section I will be referencing various sources of information collected

online. Some of these refer to HCMC on the official MaSu forum, others cite websites such as the unofficial MaSu FAQ and ‘Wikipedia’. In the case of the latter, data was small enough in quantity to be able to print off and include in appendices (1) and (2). These sources are notable because they exhibit useful vernacular knowledge about the band, but also because they summarise the band’s history, providing a good biographical introduction to MaSu if preferred by the reader.

 

When quoting end-users, I have not acknowledged nor amended grammar inaccuracies. Online grammar differs very much from offline grammar and to highlight online inaccuracies through the lens of an offline scholar would be ethnographically un-sound. I have noted edits however.

 

Figure 1, shows a screenshot from the official MaSu forum homepage, the gateway to the virtual-community upon which the majority of this Dissertation is based.

In figure 1 several major headings can be seen, such as ‘The Band’, which is then further divided into sub-headings. These are sub-sections of the forum in which one finds individual threads. When sub-sections are broken down they form a chain such as: ‘Machinae Supremacy Forum > The Band > The Music > The Newbies Guide To Frequent Topics’. When referencing a thread, I refer to the last link in the chain, the full citation of which is located as a footnote. Methodologically, there is still no one approved way of analysing web-design, much less forum layouts. However, where certain sub-sections on a forum are arranged can tell us a lot about the discourses operating within a forum. For example, ‘The Band’ includes two sections: ‘The Music’ and ‘Arcade’. ‘The Music’ is the most active section of the forum, with more new threads appearing in here than any other section. Under ‘The Music’, end-users can discuss the band’s music, like we might expect on any rock band’s forum. ‘Arcade’ is an area designed for discussion of computer/video games across all platforms.6 By putting the sub-section ‘Arcade’ under the heading ‘The Band’, a link is suggested between MaSu and computer/video gaming. The ‘Off Topic’ area is also split into two sections. ‘General’, is for discussing anything unrelated to MaSu or gaming. MaSu can still be mentioned here, but topics do not generally concern them. The ‘Musicians Section’ is where end-users can talk about their own music and the problems of recording, writing, singing, and playing music. It differs from the ‘The Music’ thread because it does not relate specifically to MaSu’s music, but the fans’ creations. Discussions are sometimes referred back to MaSu here. In numerous instances end-users would ask how a particular sound was achieved on a particular MaSu track. In such cases, these are discussions of MaSu on a musically technical level, rather than as a leisure interest. MaSu become an object of comparison for the folk to aid them in the production of their own music. For example, in ‘Question for the band (specifically Robert?)’, an end-user asked the band themselves about a particular vocal affect he wanted to recreate:

 

On the Song "Gost (Beneath the Surface)" I'd really like to know how you did the vocal effects. I've been trying to figure out how you do that, because I've heard it in a few of the band's songs before, and all attempts at recreating such an effect have failed. It's like a reverse echo/fade in on the vocals. "I stand still out in the rain......" How it fades it on a reverse echo on that part.7

 

The band replied, and throughout the thread they advised this end-user how best to recreate the desired sound for his own music:

 

Well... I dabble with chorus, flanger, delay, and more than once during the process i reverse the take and process it backwards...
Nothing advanced, you'd probably be able to do that with one chorus plugin and one delay plugin... Not counting EQ, of course.8

 

The ‘Contribute’ section contains an area for uploading guitar tabs of MaSu songs made by fans, and also a section for uploading gig photos and videos.

Music ‘Tabs’ have their own sub-section, implying a distinction from the previous two musically related categories. This sub-section is for musicians who specifically want to be able to learn to play MaSu songs, demonstrating that the band is actively encouraging fans to make their own tab transcriptions of their music. Such transcriptions might be referred to as ‘fan texts’. These are distinct from ‘poached texts’, as in Jenkins’ description (Jenkins, 1992: 28 – 33), as ‘poached texts’ imply a contortion in design from the hegemonic text, which in MaSu’s case is the music they’ve released on CD or hosted on their website. There are no ‘official’ transcriptions provided by the band, but the process of creating a 100% accurate tab transcription is done by the fans with aim to create a substitute for such ‘missing official’ transcriptions, not to contort the original song.

 

The producers, in this instance, facilitate both the primary text upon which tabs are based, but also the social space in which transcriptions can be made available to the rest of the MaSu online community. This section of the forum, in addition to the ‘Musicians section’, rebukes notions of the producer attempting to control fan production. The official text and the fan text run side by side, not just in the case of music tabs, but other fan creations like desktop wallpapers and even covers of MaSu’s songs. I asked the band to clarify their position on this particular issue, to which lead singer/guitarist Robert Stjärnström replied:

 

We totally support fan creations. The fact that fans dedicate such time and effort into such things is purely positive, in my opinion. sometimes the result is some horrid 

bastardisation of a song, and then it's almost painful, but it's still a good thing.9

 

The final two areas of the webpage are fairly self explanatory – ‘Forum Stuff’, concerning administration issues and where end-users can make suggestions for the future of the site, and ‘Salvaged Messages’. ‘Salvaged Messages’ contains threads from the previous incarnation of the forum (before MaSu’s website was redesigned in 2006). Generally, threads from the old forum are not resurrected and newer ‘live’ threads are the most important to the community. The ‘Salvaged Messages’ section is particularly useful for ‘newbies’ though, who want to know about the history of the band without contributing to HCMC themselves. This section highlights the problem of time as a discourse within forums, as virtually any discussion can be revisited provided the thread has not been closed or deleted.

 

Some end-users do not visit particular parts of the forum at all. Most of the end-users I asked about this said they were not interested in every section. Methodologically, I am not concerned with which end-users visit which areas. I recognise the quantitative possibilities of this issue, but that is outside the confines of this research project. It is interesting to note which areas are the most active from a qualitative perspective though. For example, ‘Forum Stuff’ is not as popular a section as ‘The Music’. ‘Arcade’ and ‘General’ are also popular areas. The consensus among the fans is that even though they can discuss topics other than the band on the forum, it is MaSu that is their primary reason for joining the community in the first place.

 

Having established the structure of the MaSu forum in terms of its layout, I wish to now direct attention towards structure of a more social nature, identifying how issues of hierarchy and identity work online. This is necessary to gain a contextual understanding of the discussions between producer and consumer that I shall be discussing in depth later. All folk groups are affected by their environment and an ethnographic investigation must account for this, whether it is being conducted in reality or ‘virtuality’.

 

AVATARS, ONLINE IDENTITY, AND HEIRARCHY

 

 

Usually the user-name of the end-user will appear next to the caption ‘hello’, as illustrated in Figure 2, beneath which, shows the avatar of the end-user.10

 

It is possible to change your avatar as frequently as you like, however end-users on MaSu’s forum seldom do this. This is unlike the practise with ‘signatures’, which are textual excerpts that appear at the bottom of every post by the end-user. Some end-users change their signatures frequently, either using images or caption. When an end-user adopts an avatar however, this seems to be treated as if it were as fixed as their user-name, even though it is easily changeable. Most end-users I asked about this commented that it just did not occur to them to change it. Some admitted they do change periodically, whereas others thought it was ‘confusing’ when people changed their avatar.

 

Avatars themselves vary in design from photographs of the end-users ‘offline’ self, self-rendered images, pictures from TV/film, animated GIFs11, or anime images. Often, avatars are comic in style. The avatar image can suggest interests of the end-user besides MaSu if they use a picture from a TV show. My avatar was a picture from the TV show Brass Eye. One end user private messaged (“PM’d”) me, congratulating me on being a fan of the show and we sent each other multiple messages discussing our highlights from the show. During the process of conducting this research, we never actually discussed MaSu. It occurred to me here, that it was possible to be a member of the MaSu online fan community and yet never talk about MaSu to some folk.

 

When I first came to the forum, I was able to recognise some end-user’s posts, not by their user names, but by the uniqueness of their avatar. Occasionally, avatars would be the subject of discussion, with end-users wanting to know where another end-users design came from. A particularly well-designed avatar is often given praise by other members of the community. Avatars can be seen as part of a means of establishing an online identity within a forum, which is not integral but optional (some end-users opt not to have one). They are visual signifiers of identity. As such, we can see that HCMC on forums is about more than just the literally textual. I will talk more about the visual semantics of the forum in a later section. In addition to avatars, end-users adopt symbolic user-names. This is unlike the band, who use their offline first names, instead of creating a symbolic ‘cyber-name’. Mine was ‘The_Holy_Ferret’.

 

Each end-user has a visible status rating on the forum, and can be awarded ‘karma’ for positive contributions to the community. These contributions can be file uploads such as desktop wallpaper or a Winamp skin12, or simply comments thought to be exceptional within a discussion. Post counts13 are also visible for each end-user. Administrators, moderators, and the band themselves, have their own fixed status levels, although their post counts are still visible. During the period 01/06/06 – 01/09/06, in which this research was conducted, my status level remained at ‘newbie’, however I have since achieved a post count in the hundreds and will soon progress onto the next status level.

 

A frequent debate where online communities are concerned is ‘how much does offline identity affect online identity?’ Such a question is worthy of an entire Dissertation in itself, however in the case of MaSu, it is clear that the band member’s offline identities are highly important to the other users on the forum. Miller and Slater, commenting on the theory of virtuality, in which the offline is seen as not entirely independent from the online, note “that media can provide both means of interaction and modes of representation that add up to ‘spaces or ‘places’ that participants can treat as if they were real” (Miller & Slater, 2000: 4). As such, even an offline name becomes a ‘symbolic’ name in for an end-user’s ‘cyberself’.

 

It was evident that the steps towards developing an online identity within the forum were not as applicable to the band in the same way as they were to other end-users. For example, their comments are welcomed more eagerly by the fanbase. Because different rules apply to MaSu than other end-users, this implies the issue of hierarchy, but also demonstrates the importance of the band to the forum, not merely as textual providers but as individuals in their own right. This is not to say there is not a fantasy element, or an element of adoration from the fans in interacting with the band, but it does refute Hills’ arguments towards seeing celebrities as texts in themselves. In his example, Madonna is more than just a creator of musical texts, she is a text. This is in part due to the fact her fans can never interact with her except from a consumer distance (Hills, 2002: 179). Such is not the case on the MaSu forum. One end-user PM’d me on this issue, stating that:

 

The difference with MaSu is that they’re not up their ass like Metallica. They’re not a bunch of guys who just make music. Because you can talk to them and chill in the same virtual space as them, they’re people who you can genuinely relate too. You can talk to them as a fan, but they can talk to you back in the same lingo ya know? Like, we all have more in common than just music. Computer games and other geeky stuff . You don’t get that with Metallicrap.14

 

It would be naive to suggest that the only end-users important on the forum are the band. MaSu’s online fan base spans across the world, with many fans unable to visit Sweden to see the band play live. Prior to the release of the band’s new album Redeemer (henceforth RDR), the band played some new songs live at various gigs around Sweden. One new song called ‘Fury’ was bootlegged and a copy was quickly available on the forum. Fans attempted to transcribe the songs lyrics from the recording with limited accuracy, for purpose of analysis. I contributed to the deciphering of the lyrics, debating certain words or sections of the song which were unclear on the bootleg with other end-users. When the album’s lyrics were finally made available, myself and the other fans realised how inaccurate our transcription efforts had been, which then became the subject of self-ridicule.

 

With ‘Fury’, the offline was quickly assimilated into the online. Those fans with personal access to the band offline, and who had heard the new songs, became figures of importance because their access gave them greater knowledge than other members of the forum. However, they only became important figures by virtue of them sharing information. Discussions of live performances are common and even though the forum has a specific sub-section for uploading pictures, videos, and comments about the live shows, in the instance of ‘Fury’, the importance of hearing a new song transgressed thread boundaries, as the fans desired to hear and find out as much as they could about it.

 

The issue of ‘access’ is one that MacDonald addresses, breaking down fan hierarchies into the following categories:

 

·        Hierarchy of ‘fandom level’ or ‘quality’ – In this instance fans are separated by amount of fan participation. Those that attend fan conventions and the like emphasise a ‘quality distinction’.

·        Hierarchy of ‘access’ – Some fans have access to people involved in the production of the ‘official’ item around which the fans social discourse orientates.

·        Hierarchy of ‘leaders’ – In this instance, fandom is broken down into smaller groups. Divisions may be geographically based, interest, based, or based on further developed social relations (e.g. Friendship). Within such groups, some people are delegated as leaders.

·        Hierarchy of ‘venue’ – Established when a fan hosts an event/meeting of the fan community. This does not necessarily mean geographically (MacDonald, 1998: 136 – 137).

 

Certainly a hierarchy of access exists, but other concepts within MacDonald’s theory are problematised. The ‘venue’ is hosted by the band and to say there are ‘leaders’ is to grossly misinterpret fan power relations. One of the benefits of an Internet forum is that it allows people who may be easily dominated in the real world, to be stronger in an online environment. The folk of the forum do not see themselves as being led by anybody. ‘Fandom level’ however, is explicitly present by the fact that post-counts are recorded and always visible.

Extensive vernacular knowledge about MaSu demonstrates ‘subcultural capital’, in Sandvoss’ terms, which can be related to the MacDonaldian ‘access’ category. For Sandvoss “[b]eing hip, being in the know about clubs, records and fashion, become signifiers of cultural status, and thus function as ‘subcultural capital’ (Sandvoss, 2005: 39). This concept opposes traditional notions of class-based systems of capitalisation and is entirely subjective to the knowledge base of the fan.

 

Sandvoss’ concept of subjective knowledge serving to designate hipness, within a social framework in which hipness is valued over money, implies this knowledge can only serve the one who beholds it. It is not used to help others identify what is ‘hip’, only to be seen as being hip (Sandvoss, 2005: 39). This is not the case on the forum though, as the sub-cultural capital held by certain fans of MaSu with ‘access’ or heightened knowledge levels are openly redistributed to the community as a whole. It is a capital that is given away freely – an anti-capitalist capitalism of vernacular exchange, a concept at the heart of what Tapscott calls the ‘culture of interaction’ (Tapscott, 1999: 79). MaSu’s forum opposes the Sandvosian position that sub-cultural capital serves only to maintain fan power relations (Sandvoss, 2005: 40), rather it allows power relations to exist, but they themselves are nomadic in nature. As Andrew Ross suggests, the ‘free for all’ information policy is one that originated within hacker culture but has since spread into wider Internet culture. He notes, “[i]t is a principled attempt, in other words, to challenge the tendency to use technology to form information elites” (Ross, 2000: 256). MaSu’s forum then, is characteristic of what Levy, in Collective Intelligence, terms ‘knowledge culture’. Jenkins summarises the Levyian position:

 

Far from demanding conformity, the new knowledge culture is enlivened by multiple ways of knowing. This collective exchange of knowledge cannot be fully contained by previous sources of power - bureaucratic hierarchies (based on static forms of writing), media monarchies (surfing the television and media systems), and international economic networks (based on the telephone and real-time technologies) – which depend on maintaining tight control over the flow of information (Jenkins: n.d.).

 

Knowledge is not power, the sharing of knowledge is power.

 

SHARED INTERESTS, SHARED VERNACULAR, SHARED FANDOM?

 

Prior to the release of their first commercial album Deus Ex Machinae (DXM), MaSu released several ‘promo’ tracks as free downloads. Most of these songs featured lyrics, however there were several instrumentals. Two instrumentals in particular, ‘Sidology Episode 1: Hybrid’ and ‘Sidology Episode 3: Apex Ultima’, became objects of discussion more than the others. The ‘Sidologies’ are medleys of computer game themes from the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, most of which are well known within gaming culture and especially retro-gaming. Where MaSu’s other songs are largely influenced by computer game soundtracks15, in this instance a relationship between MaSu and gaming is made explicit by the band covering these well known themes. Discussions of these instrumentals triggered talk about the games whose music was featured in the medleys. To discuss the ‘Sidology’ tracks is to implicitly discuss gaming culture.

 

For a long time, MaSu’s unofficial FAQ included the unanswered question “Where is Sidology Episode 2?”16 The official explanation was that the song was not yet good enough to be released. Fans on the forum almost anticipated this song almost as much as the release of RDR, because its release completed a trilogy that had been presumed abandoned. There were speculations, even requests, as to which computer game excerpts would appear in the medley when finally released. ‘Sidology Episode 2: Trinity’ was finally released the day ‘www.hubnester.com’ opened. Hubnester is the name of the band’s front organisation, through which they distribute all their merchandise. Upon the release of ‘Trinity’, a thread appeared in the forum discussing which computer game themes were identifiable in the medley. Robert eventually declared which themes were present, however the fans were not satisfied with just this information. They then attempted to identify where the individual game tunes featured in the ‘Trinity’ medley as they had done with the previous ‘Sidology’ tracks. In ‘TRINITY OUT’, the track was broken down into detailed sections as seen below/overleaf:

 

Supremacy (0:00-3:59) (?)

R-Type (4:00-5:50)

Skate or Die (5:51-6:15)

<missing>

Zelda (6:48-6:49)

<missing>

Last Ninja 2 (7:10-7:59)

Metroid Prime (8:00-8:15)

International Karate (8:16-10:22)

Turrican Loader (10:21-12:09)

Metroid Prime (12:10-12:50)17

 

The fans here demonstrate a form of textual analysis, identifying which notes in ‘Trinity’ came from where in computer gaming history. In order to participate in such a practise, a firm knowledge of music from the ‘retro’ era of computer gaming history is necessary. In order to appreciate ‘Trinity’ as a medley and not just an instrumental, the end-user must be acquainted, either through having played or having heard, the games whose music features in ‘Trinity’. Games like Last Ninja 2, R-Type and Turrican Loader are all from the late eighties and early nineties. In order to understand the significance of ‘Trinity’, it is necessary for an end-user to know these games. The ‘Sidologies’ explicitly reference the retro-gaming sector of wider popular culture.

 

The band, being fans of gaming themselves, had released a riddle with the release of ‘Trinity’ that their fan base took to solving. The same vernacular knowledge of computer gaming was required of the MaSu fans as the band themselves in order for this puzzle to be accepted and completed. In this instance, MaSu too are fans of the same discursive entities that their fan base also warms too. On the MaSu forum, the homogenous interest in gaming from both the band and their fan base means that between the two groups, a new object and, correspondingly, a new level of fandom is created in which the producer and consumer are no longer segregated. Just as fans can be fan/producers (to adopt a Hillsian dualism) via the production of fan texts, we must acknowledge the existence of the producer/fan too.

 

The band has admitted on several occasions to being fans of anime and other types of animation. In the thread ‘Film And TV Shows’, discussions of anime often show up among the fan base, as well as other TV programmes and films. Because some of MaSu’s fans are fans of anime too, we see compatible levels of fandom emerging between the interests of both the fans and the band. When textual producers and their fans share a fan appreciation for a work non-analogous to the producer’s creative involvement, they can create a combined or joint fandom. This concept builds on what Nancy Baym calls ‘joint projects’. As she notes:

 

In online communities, as in many offline communities, joint projects manifest through the topic around which most discussions revolves. Despite its centrality, topic is a woefully understudied influence on an online community (Baym, 2000: 137).

 

Threads like ‘Film And TV Shows’ allow for multiple fandoms to be occurring simultaneously, in which the producer is not necessarily exempt from the social discourse of fandom. Within this thread, it is entirely possible for MaSu to be participating in fan discourse on their own forum. The creation of ‘Trinity’ makes explicit MaSu’s fan status in relation to gaming.

 

Whilst band/fan hierarchies on the forum do not suddenly ‘break’ because the object of discussion can switch away from the band to gaming or anime, they can undergo a temporary process of reformulation. Depending on what the object of fandom is, alters the social discourses surrounding it in terms of band/fan relations. Fan studies have well examined how fandom can be hierarchised vertically. In doing so though, this ignores the horizontal reality that multiple fandoms can occur at the same time, exemplified by the ‘Sidology’ medleys. Thinking along this trajectory opens up a simple but overlooked question within Fan Studies, not possible in the vertical model: ‘Would any band produce music if they were not first fans of music themselves?’ The idea that you are no longer a fan if you shift into a ‘producer’ discourse is poorly conceived and not one that is evidenced on the MaSu forum. The advent of financial profit does not make you less a fan.

 

With the distinction between band and fan as totally segregate discourses now problematised, and having now established that multiple fandoms can occur within an online social space around multiple discursive objects, the question now raised is ‘what is there on the forum that can be said to be culturally specific?’ This I shall detail in the next section.

 

HYPER-REALITY AND THE EMIC/ETIC DIVIDE

 

Nancy Baym, in ‘Tune In Tomorrow’, notes the popular conception of “the social loser who can only make friends online is in many ways quite similar to that of the soap opera viewer who watches because the characters are easier to befriend than are neighbours” (Baym, 2003: 241). But where a soap world is unreal, the Internet is hyper-real, a simulacrum of the outside world encouraging end-user interactivity with other (cyber) selves, unlike in the soap. As she further notes; “[p]articipants’ interests and concerns oft reflect those that matter to them offline” (Baym, 2003: 241). In the case of the MaSu online community however, it is not the offline world that brought the folk together. MaSu’s music was accessible initially only through the use of the Internet. It is a case of the hyper-real filtering into the real, not the reverse. Which is the ‘dominant’ text, the live or the mp3, is an issue I asked the band for clarification on:

 

[S]eeing a band live is an experience that can even change your view of music as a concept, and above all certainly your view of a certain band. I do believe however 

that some fans are not the concert type and get the most out of the music while listening on mp3s on their computer.18

 

Whilst one of the appeals of Ethnography is its lack of reliance on a priori hypotheses (Hine, 2000: 42), a major methodological issue within any ethnographic approach is identifying what elements of a culture are specific to it, and which elements are culture-free, for which we do need some theoretical tools. William Sturtevent, in ‘Studies In Ethnoscience’, divides cultural characteristics into emic and etic categories. The emic qualities of a culture are those that are specific to it, whereas the etic qualities are those which are culture free, usually belonging to wider culture (Sturtevant, 1972: 133 – 135). From a post-modern perspective, the idea that there can be anything ‘culture free’ is extremely problematic, for even the language we use in day-to-day life contains culture within it. Following the post-modern turn, in which concepts such as the self, identity, culture and society have become fragmented, new communication technologies further blur the line between the self and society (Dodge & Kitchin, 2001: 21). For Christine Hine, the Internet is an “‘anything goes world’, where people and machines, truth and fiction, self and other seem to merge in a glorious blurring of boundaries” (Hine, 2000: 7). With this in mind, how are we then to distinguish between what is etic and emic? Is an end-user’s avatar an emic or etic cultural characteristic? If it is specific to the MaSu forum, then it could be considered an emic quality, but if the avatar contributes to the identity of the cyber-self outside just the forum, it could also be considered an etic quality. Moreover, is it the avatar image itself that is an etic quality, or the coding language that is used to make the avatar appear? Coding language like HTML, XHMTL, JAVA script creates the etic boundaries, because without such coding ‘virtual realities’ and their corresponding communities cannot exist. Within the hyper-reality of the Internet, the meaning of etic is in doubt, for it can be applied in many different ways when the cues of offline reality are filtered out.

 

Similarly, with emic qualities, we are posed with a similar problem. I hold no pretensions about solving the etic/emic paradox where virtual ethnography is concerned. However, I propose that on MaSu’s forum, we can see emic cultural characteristics designated through certain HCMC discussions. For example, let us imagine a newbie asks “what is Sid?” This is one of the most commonly asked questions about MaSu, so much so that responses to it by other end-users are highly predictable:

 

1. A recommendation to use the ‘search’ feature on the forum to see if such a question has been asked before.
2. The newbie will be re-directed to the unofficial MaSu FAQ or MaSu’s Wikipedia entries.
3. A genuine answer will be provided, usually with the suggestion to consider options 1 and 2 in future.

 

I suggest that ‘the obvious newbie question’ in-fact implies the location of certain emic types of knowledge within the forum. Through identifying which topics occur the most, and which issues occur most frequently in discussion, we might begin to be able to understand what is culturally specific to MaSu and what is not. MaSu’s unofficial FAQ, for example, answers many of the most commonly asked questions about the band, which are all highly culturally specific but do not belong to wider culture.

 

One thread, ‘The Newbies Guide To Frequent Topics’, came about at the suggestion of various end-users that a thread be created to stop similar topics being reposted again and again. The topics covered here are often similar to those covered in the unofficial FAQ, but here they relate exclusively to the vernacular of the forum. Within this thread are links to several other sub-threads on common topics. When a topic recurs so often as to warrant inclusion in either the unofficial FAQ, or a thread such as ‘The Newbies Guide To Frequent Topics’, it is important within the community because of its cultural specificity.

 

Two problems present themselves within the ‘common topic signifying emic cultural characteristics’ theory:

 

1. The volume of this information is so extensive it would take a huge body of researchers a long time to read it all and determine which are the most common topics. Hills calls this overload of data ‘massification’ (Hills, 2002: 174).
2. MaSu is not the sole discursive object of their own forum, with computer games, TV shows and other general topics also being discussed. Such topics relate to the offline world outside MaSu’s forum. This poses the further question ‘can, and how, does the offline world become emic online?’

 

The forum is designed to allow end-users to discuss issues such as offline life, the band’s music, gaming, and a host of other issues within certain thread boundaries, as I discussed earlier. This implies that emic forms of knowledge are structured, at least partially, by the layout of the forum itself. For example, discussing a game like Half Life 2, which the end-user may play offline, is not an issue directly to do with MaSu, but it can become an emic quality of the forum community, when discussed within the boundaries of the ‘gaming’ section. The issue of boundaries therefore suggests that there are in fact multiple levels of emic and etic, but not a clear divisible single line between them. The end-users of the forum know what discussions belong where within their world and I quickly became accustomed to these discursive boundaries.

 

Within ‘The Newbies Guide To Frequent Topics’, is an HTML link to the MaSu ‘Crap Pack’.19 The ‘crap pack’ is a webpage full of music that is not part of the bands official discography. This page contains many mp3s of MaSu tracks in the instrumental phase of their production, or tracks which have since been replaced by remastered versions. Whilst these tracks are not ‘official’, they are allowed to circulate within the MaSu online community by the band. The presence of these rare tracks facilitates the needs of the MaSu fan base to be completists, an ideology which was not intended by the band, but not discouraged either:

 

The fans have in their own might created that need-to-have, and the forum community, I believe, is where that message is spread and absorbed. There's even a thread 

at the forum about how many "machinae supremacy files" you have!20

 

The bands unofficial FAQ and Wikipedia pages list all the tracks which have been replaced by newer versions. This information, and the tracks themselves, are shared freely among the MaSu community.

 

Within the forum, it is not uncommon to see threads containing links to other threads, directing end-users to the appropriate location to find information discussed and/or made available before. The unofficial FAQ also contains links to forum discussions. This referencing of information sources within the community is used to demonstrate the credibility of the data, similar to the academic practise of citation. In addition, the Wikipedia page ‘List of Machinae Supremacy Promo songs’ also cites the forum as a source of information.21 In the case of Wikipedia, virtually anybody can edit the information maintained on the site, making it impossible to trace who added or subtracted what information. I did discover however, that the band did not create any entries, as this interview excerpt demonstrates:

 

We haven't entered anything into either of those, but I'm sure we've answered questions by fans who did. I love that there's so much info on us at Wikipedia, and the FAQ is nice too.22

 

It is discernable, through the continual use of links to other sites of knowledge, that information is directly exchanged between the FAQ, forum, and Wikipedia. In the relationship between the three, the forum can be seen as the nexus of information. The unofficial FAQ and Wikipedia pages can be seen as ‘starting points’ for the uninitiated, those end-users eager to become fans but without the social relations yet established to gain the level of knowledge of their peers. Some folk on the forum explained to me that for them, information in the unofficial FAQ and Wikipedia entries is established as that which no fan has an excuse not to know. They are sites where vernacular knowledge is made ‘semi-official’ through their fixed status. I do not mean ‘fixed’ as to imply that the data is static, as new information is always becoming available and being added, however the location of these knowledge bases is as fixed as is possible (short of server malfunctions, data erasure etc.). This provides end-users with knowledge of the band from directly within the fan community, not contorted by mainstream press coverage or media institutions like ‘Kerrang!’ or ‘MTV’ that selectively report information about mainstream rock/metal music to a mass audience.

 

Until a methodology is devised to determine how we clearly distinguish between the emic and etic qualities of virtuality in virtual ethnography, I do not feel capable, nor do I feel it my right, to impose such categories on the community. I do recognise the importance of the emic/etic dimension within ethnography though, and the location of vernacular information nexus’ is contextually useful when considering the formulation of vernacular theories on the forum (which I detail further in a later section). Having now established the relationship between different types of information on the forum, where culturally specific information is obtained and how the folk identify it, the next section discusses the meaning-making processes the folk practise in order to make this information useful.

 

NEGOTIATED MEANINGS ON THE FORUM

 

John Fiske has been particularly influential in the conceptualisation of consumers as negotiators of meanings in texts, which has had particular ramifications for Fan Studies. The issue of meaning on websites, and not just forums, is a difficult one though. Where film is a complex semantic entity because of its combined use of visuals and sound, meaning is presumed to be negotiated primarily within the narrative of the text. On a website, the narratological structure of HCMC is just one factor, to which we also have to consider the imagery on a website, the HTML coding, standard text, use of video, sound, and other practicalities of the medium.

 

With the consumers being in such close contact to the producers, it would be quite possible for MaSu to impose the ‘correct’ meanings of their songs on their fan-base. In Textual Poachers, Jenkins gives the example of a group of Star Wars fans who wrote fan fiction of ‘feminist-inflicted erotica’ nature. This was in rejection of what they saw as Lucasfilms’ insistence that they view Star Wars sexuality as corresponding to heterosexual male normative values (Jenkins, 1992: 31). Whilst there have been no particular discussions of feminist-erotica in relation to MaSu’s songs, threads have appeared in the forum designed to specifically discuss songs meanings. Unlike in Jenkins’ example though, these are generally free from intervention by the textual producers. The idea of oppositional readings seems inappropriate when the band is actively allowing the social space in which multiple meaning(s) of their songs are created. Opposition implies MaSu do not want this, which is not the case.

 

After the release of RDR, a thread appeared specifically to discuss the meanings of the new songs. Fans debated meanings with each other, developing ideas based upon each others posts, but also agreeing to disagree on many issues. Here, the issue of thread topic again evidences Baym’s ‘joint project’, a cybertext in itself, in which end-users combine their vernacular theoretical resources with the purpose of understanding the lyrical messages of MaSu. The ambiguity of MaSu’s lyrics, and the absence of any ‘imposed’ meanings by the band, means the semantic process here is less a case of ‘reading against the grain’, and more a case of ‘celebrating the grains semantic diversity’. As one end-user comments:

 

Surely the meaning of the song isn’t something worth getting stressed over? If MaSu wanted us to know exactly what the songs were, they would say or make them simpler in the first place. Being able to read into them what you want is what makes them enjoyable to each of us in our own different ways don’t you think? We should enjoy the bands diversity, not bitch over what may or may not be there. It’s just good that it CAN be there.23

 

The songs with more seemingly obvious meanings notably triggered less discussion than those songs where meanings were unclear. One notable exception occurred to this rule with the song ‘Legion Of Stoopid’. In ‘Music + Politics = ?’, the lyrics of this particular song were highlighted specifically by one end-user who found the ‘obvious’ meaning of this song to be disagreeable. This particular end-user questioned why a Swedish band would write a song like ‘Fury’, which is concerned with American news media. In this instance, Robert replied to the post, commenting that although he usually keeps quiet on political issues on the forum, this was one worthy of attention.24 What followed was a debate that included discussion on American foreign policy, the Bush administration, and the nature of the war in Iraq. In this case, the ‘intended’ or ‘hegemony’ reading of the text was revealed when Robert confirmed that this particular fan had read the text, and perceived its meaning, correctly. The HCMC that followed was not due to oppositional or mis-readings of the text, as both producer and consumer were in semantic agreement, however they were not necessarily in agreement with what the song was saying. Within the active audience tradition, we are now accustomed to the idea that if audiences do not like a meaning, they will try and interpret a text in a different way.  Here, meaning was certainly an issue of contention, but not because of semantics, because of differing politics. It is sometimes worth remembering that not all disagreements about meaning are the result of oppositional readings. For Tulloch:

 

To say that fans promote their own meanings over those of producers is not to suggest that the meanings fans produce are always oppositional ones or that those meanings are made in isolation from other social factors (Tulloch, 2004: 296).

 

Tulloch’s position can be pushed further by seeing that opposition can also occur when the semantics are agreed upon. This infers that fans do not always promote their own meanings over the producers, they are quite willing to accept the ‘correct’ interpretation, but they do not necessarily have to like it. The discussion about ‘Legion Of Stoopid’ was the only major instance I identified where in-depth discussion of a songs meaning took place between both producer and consumer.

 

The issue of semantics appears in more superficial discussions as well. The song ‘Kaori Stomp’ features lyrics in Japanese and fans who could not speak the language were frustrated at not being able to know what the lyrics meant. Eventually, Robert uploaded a translation of the lyrics, but not before one particular fan went to the trouble of translating them himself. When the lyrics were translated, the song did not go on to become a particular object of discussion within the thread.25 What we see here is that the meaning of this song was not as important as the potentiality to uncover its meaning. By not having access to a translation, the fans missed potential insight into the workings of the band, which is not permissible.

 

Thus far I have treated meaning as an issue pertaining to HCMC of a literally textual nature. Earlier on I commented on avatars, how they could be seen as ‘markers’ of identity, and I pointed out the frequency of anime art in some end-users avatars. Unfortunately, I do not have access to all the images used by the band during online publicity since their inception. Some of them have resurfaced in the forum or elsewhere at various points in time. Where most bands feature a biography with pictures and descriptions of the individual band members, MaSu’s official website in an early incarnation did so with a slightly unusual twist – no photographs were given of the band, only anime-style images. The recurring presence of anime imagery in the forum from the fans in addition to this, gives the wider culture surrounding MaSu a particular visual aesthetic in itself.

 

Whilst, my skills are not in the textual analysis of website design, the anime factor is interesting because it signifies a commonality of interests between producer and consumer other than rock music or gaming. Building on my earlier concept of joint fandoms, meaning can be seen to be contained within the visual here, by signalling interest in an artistic form/sub-culture outside of the forum. This is also true of gaming references. I asked MaSu if they thought the gaming influences in their music were important in the bands reception:

 

Maybe in a broader spectrum, like saying for instance that metal is easier to market online than folk music, due to its listener base's familiarity with computers and the 

Internet. It does influence how we want to profile ourselves, however, I mean a fantasy theme on an album cover for instance would not fit well with our technocentric

metal identity.26

 

Joint-fandom can be seen as instrumental in the bands self-profiling when both band and fan have a shared meaningful understanding of the significance of computer game or anime aesthetics.

 

I have demonstrated thus far how the band is not the sole discursive object of discussion within the MaSu fan community and how MaSu’s fans negotiate meanings on the forum within the band’s texts, but do not necessarily oppose them in the Fiskian sense. The next section concerns more explicit negotiations between producer and consumer.

 

THE MULTIPLE DISCOURSES OF BAND/FAN DISCUSSION

 

Van Maanen in Tales Of The Field, reflecting on the work of Clifford Geertz, suggests an ethnographic account of a culture’s human participants can be achieved by examining the relationship between what they say and what they do (Van Maanen, 1988: 17). Within online forums this is problematic, as all interaction is multi-textual for when an end-user types text, it also creates HTML code text, invisible to the GUI27. In most circumstance, what end-users ‘do’ is revealed directly through what they ‘say’ via HCMC. Dodge and Kitchin, building on the concepts of Rheingold, suggests that cyberspace is a place defined by words rather than body (Dodge & Kitchin, 2001: 53). To ‘do’ implies a physical, or at least extra-textual, action. Online, the ‘saying’ and ‘doing’ of cyber-culture are blurred together. For David Bell, Cyberspace is an all encompassing environment, in which ‘what it is’ and ‘what it means’ are inseparable (Bell, 2001: 7). However, that is not to suggest that by looking at HCMC, we cannot see different strategies of cultural participation, suggestive of the ‘doing’ of culture. This section draws attention to a number of social discourses, ‘done’ by cultural participants, that I observed.

 

 

MaSu’s fans are often critical and aware of their own status as fans. As one user comments:

 

[…] it isn't wrong to admit that you don't like something, even with such a good band as Machinae. Praising anything they do won't do any good; let them know when you don't like something, give constructive suggestions how it could be done better and maybe they'll get some other ideas for the next song. You don't have to be a fanboy/girl, just be a fan.28

 

The ‘fanboy/girl’ is a blind follower of MaSu, who will not hear a wrong word said of the band. For this particular end-user, such an attitude is unconstructive. The quote expressed recommends that ‘real fans’ adopt what academics might call critical distance. Certainly the online MaSu fanbase are not un-critical of the band’s works, voicing their displeasure about certain songs, and even issues such as CD packaging:

 

[…] also the quote on the inside this time round. Buffy the vampire slayer? Thats not too epic for me, but on DXM they found Kierkegaard.29

 

This particular end-user felt that RDR was insufficiently ‘epic’ in feel compared to DXM, reflected in the fact that where DXM quoted Kierkegaard in the CD booklet, RDR quoted Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Upon reflection, I wish I had defended Buffy.

 

Certain end-users were more articulate in their criticisms than others, some talking purely in terms of aural aesthetics, some about lyrics, some were much more technical about the music. As one fan comments on the audio mastering of RDR:

 

It clips. Why do you participate in the loudness race? It's no use. If someone want's to hear the music loud, he will simply adjuste the volume knob on his stereo. Increasing the level on the CD until the edge will just degrade fidelity and introduce clipping. The lost data can never be restored. Also, excessive dynamic compression makes the music dull and long listening gets fatiguing. That's not a MaSu problem. The vast majority of today's releases are mastered too hot, but it's always a pity when a CD that you love is affected.

Peaks all chopped off:


Redeemer (top square wave), other recently released CD with sensible volume (middle), random music DVD with usual volume (bottom)
30

 

 

In this instance, the fan’s criticisms are technical, akin to a film fan commenting on a director’s choice of lens to shoot a particular scene. This end-user uses screenshots taken from a sound-editing programme, as he indicates in the quote, to demonstrate where the ‘faults’ lie in RDR’s mastering. This is an action ‘done’, but still represented through the textual. The ‘doing’ of a culture in cyberspace is a symbolic activity, reliant on expression through the ‘saying’ of HCMC.

 

Robert replied to this post, justifying his preference for heavy mastering, in comparison to the “lame” mastering of DXM,31 responding in similarly technical terms. Whilst my knowledge of mastering was not sufficient for me to partake in the discussion, it was evident here that the band and their fans were able to talk using the same musically technical language and music related theory. This ‘insider theory’, in McLaughlin’s terms, is also ‘outsider theory’ to those on the forum, besides the band, who know about audio mastering.

 

Some fans identified that tracks from RDR had been used partly before in the Jets ‘N’ Guns (JNG) computer game soundtrack and were displeased that excerpts from free songs were being ‘reused’ in the commercial album. This led Robert to comment in reply:

 

It may have escaped most people that Jets'n'Guns was not made for you. It was made for Rake in Grass, and the game Jets'n'Guns. We chose to release it for free (becuz we lub j00 guyzzes) because we could. So I get a little sad when this hits us in the face like it's a bad thing. We sometimes back-reference lyrics, and there's no denying that regardless of what came first, parts of songs has been reused. But I think anything that you hear on Redeemer is quite different from it's "counterpart" on JnG. Those who'd claim that Reanimator is the same as FutureMachine, I'd like to urge to reconsider.32

 

Some days after this post, Robert created a thread announcing that the bands third album would feature a re-interpretation of the track ‘Flight Of The Toyota’ from JNG33. This was directly because of the earlier discussion and evidences that the band is not in a position to ‘abuse’ their status as textual producer. If the fan base thinks they are being ‘cheated’, they will voice opinion. Here, the ‘done’ is implied through HCMC, by virtue of the fact that extensive listening to RDR must have been conducted in order to make these critical observations. Listening to RDR does not require an Internet connection, so cultural practices can occur outside the boundaries of the forum. Effectively though, they only become ‘done’ in virtuality when they are ‘said’ through HCMC. As such, what is ‘done’ is irrelevant except through end-user disclosure. As Kanayama suggests, “most behaviours and actions in the virtual community are inscribed only as visible discourses” (Kanayama, 2003: 273).

 

As demonstrated in the examples given in this section, MaSu fandom is not a case of wish fulfilment by engaging with a ‘virtual celebrity’, but a dialogue between the textual producer and consumer that requires constant two-way interaction. Fans are not talked down to, and can discuss issues about the technicalities of production with the band on an equal level, whilst still being self-reflexive about their social position as fans. They are aware of their multiple possible fan identities such as ‘fanboy/fangirl’ or ‘critic’.

 

Having now addressed the complexity of issues of identity and hierarchy, multiple levels of fandom, culturally specific knowledge, and negotiations of meaning between both fans themselves and fans and the band combined, I am now in an able position to discuss how and where genre discourse operates within the forum and what it means to the folk there.

 

GENRE, WHAT GENRE?

 

A previous incarnation of MaSu’s homepage featured the quote “The origin of Sid Metal” as the title of the HTML. Within the unofficial FAQ, the lexemes ‘New Frontier’ and ‘Alternative Rock’ have been used as labels for the band’s musical style. Wikipedia, as well as various webzines, also refer to the band by the term ‘Sid Metal’. All of these labels belong within vernacular discourse, as proved by the fact they appear on the likes of Wikipedia and the unofficial FAQ. These labels have emerged from within the MaSu online community, rather than being imposed by some external body. In an interview on the metal webzine ‘Treehouse Of Death’, entitled ‘The Commodore Generation’, we gain a more specific insight into the band’s ideas about what genre they operate within:

 

I believe the main thing, if you were to ask the average fan, is the use of video gaming influences and sounds in combination with serious shredding metal… Though we’re never afraid to sweeten it down a bit now and then, either. The vocal style is also not one commonly heard in metal bands.[6]

 

The band here describes their musical style as if from the perspective of a fan. Their close interaction with their fan base gives them the opportunity to do this, rather than just talking about the music in technical terms. The complete interview also reveals some of the bands musical influences, both computer game related and from the rock/metal spectrum. In the latter case, the bands cited as influences are from a wide variety of genres such as thrash metal, Swedish punk, even Kiss get a mention. Interestingly, MaSu’s fanbase, in their discussions of their non-MaSu musical preferences reveal a wide spectrum of bands from different genres. There were those who liked metal, those who liked punk, electronica, classic rock, pop, and in most cases they liked a combination of different styles. This eclecticism makes it virtually impossible to group the MaSu fanbase into any one musical sub-culture such as Goth, Emo, Indie, Punk, or Metalhead (Muggleton, 2000: 12).

 

One of the most celebrated aesthetics of MaSu is their use of the Sid-station and synthesiser. The ‘Sid-station’ is a hardware application used to generate sounds that can be loaded into a synthesiser. The sound chip within it is taken from the Commodore 64 home computer, which was very popular during the late 1980s. Because of this, the sound it creates is one that originated in, and is usually associated with, computer gaming. ‘Sid-metal’ designates a sub-genre of heavy metal that incorporates the use of the Sid-station to a large extent.[7] For the band, the Sid-station is just one of many elements to MaSu’s music, as Gordon explained to me in a thread I initiated to find out just how important the use of Sid was to the community:

 

Machinae is not only sid stuff. Machinae is good music.  Sometimes we don't use sid and have other synth sounds instead. But we like sid a lot.[8]

 

For some end users the Sid was a pivotal ingredient in their sound, as this particular end-user comments:

 

Well, MaSu is a great band, even without the SID. But: I came to like Machinae because of the retro-gaming-like SID-sounds and their songs that remind me of old video games like Hero, Arcade and Player One. Of course I like the other songs, too, because I like their style and the themes of most of their songs. But what made me a fan of their music, and what makes them unique to me, is their videogames style and the SID sound. I think they'd just be "that band I heard last week" without video games and without the SID. SID makes them Machinae Supremacy.[9]

 

For others, MaSu is an issue of more than just the Sid aesthetic. As one end user suggested:

 

‘Listen to chuck rock in the crappack... it sounds extremely videogamey, but doesnt use any sid![10]

 

This end-user introduces the idea of MaSu as ‘videogamey’ in sound, but not directly because of the use of Sid-station or synthesisers. Since it appeared that the issue of Sid was not as pivotal as I had anticipated, I asked how important being a gamer was in the liking of MaSu and was there anyone on the forum who actively despised gaming, to which I received this reply:

 

on here, not that i know of. but ive introduced machinae to a lot of mates who had no previous interest in gaming, and they absolutely loved them. none of them really seemed to "get" the sidologies, but they loved most of the songs, and liked the sid sound because of it's uniqueness. [11]

 

Another end-user reinforced this opinion stating that “id say its just more likely gamers will enjoy MaSu then non-gamers, not that non-gamers are likely to dislike MaSu.”[12] The issue of Sid-station necessity is not one that can be generalised over, however, we can generalise that by being a gamer you hear more in MaSu than a non-gamer (the significance of the ‘Sidologies’ for example). For some, the gaming connection was personal:

 

I love the SiD. Its the number one sound from my childhood, and Machinae represents that innocent, I-can-do-anything feeling that I had as a child, not only via the SiD but in the lyrics as well. I haven't heard Redeemer yet (roll-on payday!) so I can't comment on any SiD or lack of there, but I do know my fave Machinae tracks are the SiD-heavy ones, like the Jets'n'Guns soundtrack.[13]

 

In this particular thread I created, only one end-user mentioned the significance of the Sid-station as qualifying the band as ‘Sid metal’. Having outlined in part one the importance of considering the vernacular of both the producer and consumer, I needed to know where the band ‘stood’ on the genre issue. This interview excerpt reveals a great deal on this matter, specifically concerning the issue of being tagged by one genre label:

 

I don’t believe it really matters from an audience/fan point o view, though. I’ve noticed how Machinae Supremacy fans seem to give the band the genre label that best fits the songs they like the most, and I think that’s ok. It doesn’t really hurt the band, or any band for that matter. The disadvantage with “Sid Metal”, even though we coined the phrase ourselves, is that it has no meaning to anyone who doesn’t know what “Sid” is. Many people recongnize the video game influences, but that doesn’t mean they know what the sound chip was called.[14]

 

As the band sums up; “it is clear to me and many people I’ve talked to, that even though you can’t put a simply, standardized label on our music, you can still always tell it is us.”[15] This attitude was reflected in many discussions on the forum. MaSu are sometimes loosely categorised as metal or rock, but the issue of genre largely surfaces only in two situations:

 

1. When discussions of introducing the band to the ‘uninitiated’ is concerned.
2. When it is necessary to compare MaSu to an etic outside criterion.

 

Fans were able to formulate expectations of what aesthetics ‘makes’ MaSu sound like MaSu, and in some instances, referencing other genres of music was a means to do so, as in the below example:

 

Machinae is true metal. Not metalcore. Any metalhead will be able to tell you that going metalcore is a bad move for a band these days. Especially if they've already got a true metal sound to them. Going metalcore would be throwing it away, really.[16]

 

This fan in particular defines MaSu as a metal band, but what genre of metal is unclear. ‘True’ implies ‘purity’ to MaSu, which this end user does not feel is present in the ‘metalcore’ genre[17]. Within wider metal culture, the term ‘true’ is used in opposition to ‘fake’ or ‘poser’, generally associated with ‘mainstream’ bands. Its appropriation here was used to defend MaSu against accusations that they might pursue a more commercial ‘screamy’ direction.

 

Before the release of RDR, three songs were made available from the album sessions. One of these, the fans were initially informed, was not going to be on the album, but following fan praise, it has since ended up as a bonus track on the ‘Retail Edition’ of RDR. Whilst many fans praised the songs, some users felt there was an absence of the use of the Sid-station in comparison with MaSu’s previous efforts. This has proved to be a recurring observation regarding RDR in general. A poll was set up to vote and discuss which album out of DXM and RDR was the best. Some fans preferred DXM, usually citing its greater use of the Sid-station and more consistent atmosphere as being a crucial reason, others preferred the ‘rawness’ of RDR and its more varied atmosphere. There were several other reasons for these positions too and I do not wish to imply the opinions of the MaSu fanbase could always be segregated into simple camps. MaSu’s fans are not unable to account for their warming to the band, as the likes of Hills would suggest, they have discernable reasons why they like the band and why they like certain songs/albums more than others, but these cannot be reduced to mass generalisation. In threads such as the ‘DXM versus RDR’ thread, we can see that some fans had formulated vernacular theories of how much Sid-station was necessary or expected from MaSu. These views were not homogenous though. Some end-users commented that since MaSu had developed their sound from the beginning, it was expected that RDR would be different. Two theoretical vernacular frameworks are present where the issue of the Sid-station is concerned:

 

1. A framework in which MaSu have an expected level of usage of the Sid-station and a ‘concrete’ standard of aesthetics which should be adhered too.
2. A framework advocating musical evolution, which can include more or less use of the Sid-station where appropriate.

 

The song ‘Hate’, off RDR, is arguably one of the ‘heavier’ songs in the band’s catalogue. Some end-users suggested the band use a ‘scream’ vocal style occasionally, stating that it may compliment a song like ‘Hate’. As one end-user commented, “[h]ostiles just cannot be sung, it's not possible.”[18] Some end-users welcomed the concept of scream vocals, other responses were of the ‘ARE YOU MAD?’ variety. For many fans, the lack of screaming was not only something that appealed to their tastes of vocal style, but it was also a key ingredient in what makes the band different from other bands:

 

I think that's the stylistic device of the song. Everybody can make a song called "Hate" and growl his/her lungs out...[19]

 

Here, fans theorised specifically about MaSu’s vocal style – its appeal, its benefits, and why it should/should not remain the way it is. Musical aesthetics can be broken down into singular components, if discussion warrants this. To be able to discuss MaSu’s aural aesthetics with other end-users on the forum, an open mind is compulsory. Statements about MaSu’s sound that are claimed as if they are objective fact are usually critiqued by other end-users.

 

Within the comments on these threads, one can clearly see end-users developing their own rules and ideas of what MaSu should/does sound like and what aesthetic attributes are entailed. Where scholars may recognise discussions of musical conventions as, at least implicitly, suggesting a genre discourse, the term ‘genre’ rarely appears on the forum. Those fans that missed the overt presence of the Sid-station on RDR made their comments in reflection of MaSu’s other works, not in terms of a generic expectation. Whatever work by the band that is being discussed is always compared to the bands other works first, before bringing in outside criterion.

 

Notably, the band members largely did not interfere in such discussions, rather fans were left to discuss their ideas of what makes MaSu who they are. The fans are given a social space in which they are actively encouraged to theorise about MaSu’s style, even if it opposes the views of the band. The expected “do’s and ‘don’ts” of the bands style, from the perspective of the MaSu fan base, is an issue the band are aware of. I asked them to clarify the issue for me, also questioning what is gained for them by maintaining such close contact with their online fan base:

 

Some of the do's and don'ts we've "planted" and others they came up with all on their own. We try to remove what we feel are misconceptions if we find any, but mostly 

we let the fans maintain their view of what is what. I think we achieve, first and foremost, a direct feedback link that is very valuable but also sometimes frustrating and 

annoying. But when the feedback is positive, it really juices us up to go on and keep producing and playing because we get to see the result and effect our work has, 

instantly and up close, on our audience.[20]

 

The genre status of MaSu is largely an irrelevant concept within the community. One of the most commonly celebrated aspects about the band on the forum is how they are so dissimilar to other bands in terms of their sound. It is arguable then, that genre does not emerge as a discourse in specific relation to MaSu’s aesthetics on the forum because MaSu are not part of a ‘movement’. There are no other bands playing the particular style that MaSu play, thus ‘Sid metal’ exists as a lexeme, but not a generic discourse in itself. Genre is a concept applied to a group of entities, serving to prompt aesthetic comparison. On the forum, MaSu are celebrated because of their lack of comparability. To the fans, MaSu are not ‘Sid metal’, ‘new frontier’, ‘alternative rock’ or any other genre. They are simply MaSu.

 

A genre cannot be said to be an independent object arising from a sole text. A band can defy all pre-existing generic classifications, but do not represent a new genre

themselves until they are part of a wider corpus of bands demonstrating analogous aesthetics. New generic conventions do not designate new genres alone. This seems to imply that genre is an issue of quantity, not quality. From an industry point of view, MaSu do not fit an existing aesthetic mould and thus are not part of a mass-marketable generic movement. From the fans point of view, they are not part of a mass-marketable generic movement because they are not fashioned from an existing mould. Whilst in the case of the former they may be dismissed, in the case of the latter, they are celebrated. For the folk of the forum, genre is an insignificant concept compared to the wider phenomenon of MaSu as a whole.

 

 

 

Part Three

 

Conclusions

 

‘THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS’: THE BENEFITS OF DIRECT CONTACT WITH THE TEXTUAL PRODUCERS

 

During the course of writing this Dissertation I sent several questions to the band in an e-mail, some of which raised the issue of online marketing. This was widely dismissed by the band, who commented their only form of marketing had been through their fans telling other people about them. From my scholarly perspective, I had thought that the release of tracks like ‘Ghost (Beneath The Surface)’ were part of some grand design, released at a specific date for a specific reason. For a scholar, the concept of a text being released ‘whenever’ is not viable. It has to fit a model, there has to be a meaning, and nothing occurs ad hoc. Thus, when I asked the band why they redesigned their website and released ‘Ghost (Beneath The Surface)’ when they did, I was shocked to get this reply: 

 

Our old website was great, but we felt that it'd been around for nearly four years and it was time to make a change. It's not about dissing the old one but rather upgrading the look a little to breathe new life into the online face of our band. I'm not sure if there was any conscious thought to when we made Ghost available, though. :)49

 

I had over-analysed the significance of the redesigned MaSu website and the release of ‘Ghost (Beneath The Surface)’. The reality was that these events occurred, not as part of some grand marketing strategy, but because the band just felt ‘it was time to make a change’. Harold Schechter in The Bosom Serpent, notes the way scholars over-intellectualise fictional narratives in popular culture, because of the academic necessity to raise them to a level that can warrant analysis within the academy (Schechter, 1988: 4 – 5). Such criticisms were applicable here too. Through contact with the textual producer, and of course the fans, I was able to identify when I had over-read elements of MaSu and the forum culture.

 

MaSu is a worldwide phenomenon. Though their fanbase is nowhere near as big as the likes of Iron Maiden, through their website MaSu form closer relationships with their fanbase:

 

I believe that on top of the website it has been our close connection and willingness to intermingle with our fans online that's made them so motivated to spread the word and our music. Machinae Supremacy has gained its fame 100% thanks to the fans, since no advertising or similar has ever been done by us or anyone else. We simply made the music and made it available, as well as maintain

the site, the forum and such, and the rest has happened on its own.50

 

As Dhalgren notes, “the old model that equated mass availability with mammoth corporations such as the BBC, is out-dated in the era of media convergence, because the bourgeois ‘high culture’ have no hegemonic control of the medium that reaches the masses” (Dahlgren, 1998: 301). The issue of hegemony struggle seems inapplicable when thousands of people can now obtain over the Internet what someone produces in their bedroom, through the likes of video-sharing communities like ‘You Tube’. Scholars of the hegemony conflict school are looking for struggle where there is not any because of age-old distrusts of anything associated with the term ‘mass’, but as MaSu explained to me: “[W]e never thought we'd be this famous when we started, so there were no thoughts of "industry logic" as you put it, or any other plans for world conquest.”51

 

For Hine, “[t]he audience is an imagined category that producers orient to in making their work meaningful” (Hine, 2000: 37). In addition, “[c]ategories such as producer, user and audience are constructed through the practices of production and consumption” (Hine, 2000: 37). We have come to think of these terms as mutually exclusive, predominantly because of the general inaccessibility of the producer to scholars. I have demonstrated how producers are as much fans themselves as the folk who celebrate their works. With the benefit of insider knowledge from the band, I have avoided the typical Reception Studies pitfalls of implying the prerogatives and desires of textual producers without any verification.

 

‘INSIDIOUS’: PROBLEMS ENCOUNTERED DURING THIS INVESTIGATION

 

In Part 2 I discussed Van Maanen’s idea that ethnography is about reporting the relationship between what is said and what is done in a culture. I noted that this was problematic, because the online world is textual on several levels. I am aware I have ignored issues such as hypertext in this research, in this instance not referring to the post-modern conception of ‘hyper’, but that of hypertext markup language (HTML). Certainly a more technical approach to analysing forums is welcomed by myself and other scholars within the field such as David Bell, but for now the ‘doing’ of cyberia remains textual (Escobar, 2000: 62 – 66). Exception occurs in the instance of offline interactions that impede on the online world, like sitting at one’s computer (Bell, 2001: 195). Online ethnography cannot reveal such details however, for as Hine suggests:

 

The ethnography of the Internet does not necessarily involve physical travel. Visiting the Internet focuses on experiential rather than physical displacement (Hine, 2000: 46).

 

This is one of the many ways in which virtual-ethnography differs from orally based ethnographic traditions emphasising body-to-body communication, absent of any cyber-mediations. The complex relationship between the ‘done’ and the ‘said’ was not one I had sufficiently accounted for. Where the likes of Van Maanen, in Tales From The Field, could report the actions of people in the culture para-textually, any such physical/body to body interactions were lost to me. Hine notes that:

 

Traditionally, oral interactions have been foremost for ethnographers, and texts have taken a somewhat secondary role as cultural products, worthy of study only as far as they reveal something about the oral settings in which culture resides. Hammersley and Atkinson interpret this reliance on oral interaction as part of the ‘romantic legacy’ of ethnography (Hine, 2000: 52).

 

In my research I had no choice but to treat my data as entirely textual, dispensing with any such romanticism. As such, I found myself straying into discourse analysis on frequent occasions, rather than documenting my social interactions and formulating what I had initially assumed would be a ‘confessional tale’, in the truest Van Maanian definition (Van Maanen, 1988: 73 – 81). As Howard notes, one of the problems with ‘virtual ethnography’ is that “[m]ethodological innovation had not kept pace, sometimes resulting in studies that claim to be ethnographies but that are clearly not the product of an authors’ immersion in the lives of their subjects” (Howard, 2002: 551). Essentially, the experiential interactivity dimension becomes lost in translation.

 

Through the re-drafting process I incorporated more classic ethnographic descriptions of interactions between myself and the MaSu community, both fans and the band. The likes of Miller and Slater’s The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach, whose work was of influence to me, made no mention of such quandaries and neither did other works of virtual ethnography I encountered prior to setting about my methodology. Having never practised this kind of ethnography before, I have since become aware of how easy it is to represent forums in a manner that ‘laboratises’ them in the write up.

 

I had underestimated the methodological quandaries I would encounter. In addition, I also felt slightly overwhelmed at the amount of theoretical work on cyber-culture and cyber-studies in general. Having had only a limited exposure to this during the course of my MA, I had a lot more ‘new information’ to take in than I had anticipated, for I had naively presumed the bulk of my research would be mainly around ethnography. However, cyber-centric investigations require a far greater knowledge of the politics and technicalities of the medium than I had encountered previously in my academic career. As I am reasonably computer literate I was able to overcome the latter, but upon reading the vast amounts of scholarship on cyber-studies I became aware of a great many issues and implications that I needed to consider, but were nonetheless far outside the confines of a 20,000 word Dissertation. For example, end-users usage and occasional subversion of HTML code is something I have not paid attention to, because of word limit and time constraints. In future research, I think it is necessary to pay as much attention to the technical as the social.

 

Other problems I encountered were of a more social nature. At times I found it difficult to infiltrate aspects of the community. This was not because any of the end-users were difficult to get on with in anyway way, but there are several strong end-user relationships within the forum, with in-jokes and in-references to which I still am not fully aware. Kim Schrøder et al, in Researching Audiences, suggests that at the point of cultural saturation an ethnographer should ‘pull out’ of the locale. With this always a consideration, I felt intimidated by the pressures of the ethnographic necessity to feel immersed, concerned that if I did not experience comunitas to the Schrøderian degree, that I must be doing something wrong. To add pressure, the time I ‘pulled out’ of the locale was dictated by external research deadlines. Upon reflection, I have come to regard the idea of ‘cultural saturation’ as impossible because it implies the possibility of a totalistic account of culture, neglecting the fact that there are elements of a culture that even the folk studied are not aware of. On MaSu’s forum, this is generally for those folk who are not regular posters. One end-user PM’d me on this issue:

 

The thing is, some of us are here just to enjoy the music and talk about games and stuff. Some peeps here are absolute Machinae die-hards. Me, I work for a living so I don’t get to spend as much time on here as those guys. Some stuff goes over my head, but I’m as much a Machinae-head as anyone else here.52

 

During my time on the forum, some end-users left and never returned, which affected the cyber-relationships between the end-users. This premise of cultural saturation is facetious to the reality that a culture is a constantly evolving entity, with the relationships within it never static. As one end-user told me:

 

Glad you like the forum dude. I’ve been here bout a year and some peeps have come and gone. The place changes all the time. Like when Redeemer came out, that created sides between people who preferred that to the first one. I don’t mean sides like WWII stylee, but it means we have a new way to talk about things. Each Machinae release changes the forum, but in a good way like.53

 

For this end-user, there were ‘sides’ on the forum between those who preferred DXM to RDR and vice versa, which although were not hostile (he uses the analogy of World War II), did lead to new, sometimes conflicting, ways of thinking about MaSu’s music.

 

My immersion in the culture of MaSu has had many non-scholarly benefits. I still visit the forum and PM some members regularly. The ‘tabs’ section discussed in Part Two has aided me in my own musical endeavours and I have since uploaded some of my sheet music transcriptions of MaSu’s music after learning many of MaSu’s keyboard parts. Whilst I initially did this to assimilate the activities of the folk of the forum in order to immerse myself within their world, I have since found that I enjoy these activities post-research. From a Schrøderian position, this arguably demonstrates an inability to withdraw critically, however I view that for the ethnographer to feel changed in some way at the end of his/her investigation, only then does it demonstrate that he/she has been immersed in a culture fully. If, as is the ethnographic argument, there is no harm in the scholar intervening and thus changing the cultural setting investigated, then equally one should not feel scholarly guilt at being affected by the culture studied.

 

‘KINGS OF THE SCENE’: WHAT AND WHERE IS SID-METAL?

 

I initially set out to identify if we could gain an understanding of what makes new genres emerge and succeed, by looking at producer/consumer relationships, rather than just the text and its reception. I approached my research with this question in mind, because to simply analyse producer/consumer relationships on its own was too vast. My research needed an academic foci. Originally, I had intended to examine producers and consumers in two separate sections of this Dissertation, but during the course my research it became apparent that whilst we might academically recognise distinctions between producer and consumer, ethnographically speaking they should not be treated separately as they operate within the same folk setting. Whilst there are identifiable hierarchies, placing the band at the top as textual creators, the folk of the forum do not see social relations as solely being in terms of producer and consumer. These terms are too ‘mechanical’ to describe the views of the folk on the forum. I have suggested producer/consumer relations are horizontal as well as vertical, and that it is impossible to be a textual producer without being a fan at the same time. The relationship between producer and fan in the case of MaSu is certainly not one of bi-polar juxtaposition. MaSu certainly profit from their fanbase, but to then term them as exploiters is excessive. To exploit implies a certain level of manipulation which is devoid of self interest, and yet it is clear that MaSu enjoy what they do. The Radwayian concept of the ‘leisure world’ neglects the idea that leisure and work can be combined. MaSu do profit from their musical endeavours, but they exist as a band primarily because they enjoy music as much as their fanbase.

 

The issue of social hierarchy is one of six key points I suggested as important to examine in Part One, which I can here expand upon. In Part Two I identified how the band actively encouraged fan creations as they engaged in discussions with their fans, sometimes from the role of textual creators, but sometimes as fans of other aspects of popular culture themselves. They are able to communicate with their fan-base on a much more intimate level than the likes of Britney Spears, participating in jokes and discussions sometimes completely removed from MaSu’s music. I identified how the forum is the nexus of the majority of vernacular information pertaining to the band, the place where the message of MaSu is absorbed and spread outwards into wider culture, both real and virtual. The bands exclusive use of Internet to make their music available centralises the location of MaSu’s textual distribution, but is also the same cyber-space in which the culture of the band operates. As Robert elaborated for me, this technocentricity is implicit in the bands ‘profiling’, their imagery full of cyber references. Many of MaSu’s fans are technically aware, of both the production processes behind musical creation, but also of the capabilities of their computers. Their general interest in gaming requires this. MaSu have totally embraced the culture of techno-literacy and made it both a way of marketing the band, but also part of the bands’ identity itself. It is out of this that the lexeme ‘sid metal’ emerges.

I have demonstrated how the issue of genre, and of the genre label, ‘sid metal’ is largely irrelevant to the fanbase. However, the presence of the sid-station is certainly an issue, one with many differing perspectives but all of which share the assumption that it is an important aesthetic. It is between the shared interest in retro-gaming from both MaSu and their fans, that sid becomes a significant aesthetic. This is not to say non-gamers cannot enjoy MaSu, but they can never appreciate the band in the same way as the end-users of the forum. MaSu’s audience then, is not based on a musical sub-culture, e.g. Punk, Goth, Metalhead or any other. MaSu’s fans cover a wide variety of musical interests, but from the research I have conducted it seems it is MaSu’s aesthetic references to retro-gaming that makes them stand out from the crowd. The folk of the forum do not care about what genre MaSu plays in, only that they provide a sound other bands do not. For the fans, MaSu’s uniqueness from other bands makes them, as one of their song titles goes, ‘kings of the scene’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE FUTURE OF ONLINE PRODUCER/CONSUMER RELATIONS:

A ‘SOUNDTRACK TO THE REBELLION’?

 

On 14/09/06, BBC’s early morning programme Breakfast included an interview with the band Shamura Curves54, in which they commented on their use of myspace.com, how it enabled them closer interaction with their fans, and how the internet has enabled them to reach thousands of people without being on a major record label who

would take the majority of their album sales profits. I predict that as the Internet expands, we will saw more artists turning away from traditional methods of textual distribution involving major labels, towards more ‘glocalised’ (Robertson, 1995: 29) cyber-centric distribution networks. As such, the lines between industry and fan will continue to blur as the record label middle men are cut out and distribution becomes artist centred rather than label centred. The likes of Brinner in Knowing Music, Making Music have begun to pay scholarly attention to the production of music as a social discourse, arguing (as I have done) to merely examine reception is completely one sided. Ideally, further emphasis should be placed on this, that we may see the ‘complete picture’ emerging in the relationship between textual creation and end-user reception.