Getting a Life by Benjamin Woo

Author:Benjamin Woo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MQUP
Published: 2017-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US: INFRASTRUCTURES AND INTERMEDIARIES

No practice can exist – at least, not for long – without the support of institutions. Indeed, one sign of a mature practice is the existence of distinctive, autonomous institutions. In MacIntyre’s schema, the role of institutions is to collect and redistribute external goods. One way to talk about institutions’ roles in the geek-culture scene is in terms of sub-cultural infrastructures, a term Hodkinson (2002) introduces in his study of British goths. Thus, we might begin a consideration of sub-cultural institutions by asking what members need in order to participate in some practice. The “values” discussed in chapter 3 serve as a good starting point for thinking through this problem.

In the city where I conducted fieldwork, a number of organizations, groups, and clubs mount events for their members and the general public. These events range from small, relatively informal game nights to periodic screenings of cult-classic films or children’s cartoons to multi-day conventions. Their partners or sponsors in many of these ventures are specialty retail stores, which not only host and develop their own events but are themselves meeting places for local participants. In addition to pursuing their own ends as not-for-profit societies or small businesses, these institutions provide an economic and organizational base for subcultural activities. They organize markets for commodities (i.e., goods to be collected and about which aesthetic judgments are made), act as venues for interaction (i.e., sites where people can showcase their familiarity with and mastery of relevant cultural references), and connect participants to networks for communication (i.e., opportunities to exchange information and build expertise within and across scenes). This is probably not an exhaustive list, but it provides a start for analyzing how communities of practice are articulated together by institutions.

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