Internet Subculture Research Articles

INFLUENCE AND DISCUSSION: CHINESE YOUTH INTERNET SUBCULTURE AND DOMINANT CULTURE

In China, the interaction between youth Internet subcultures and the dominant culture has reached a new stage of development. Based on Danmu’s videos and comments on the Bilibili website, this paper examines the relationship between Chinese youth Internet subculture and dominant culture by analysing the New Year party held on this website, the videos released by the Central Committee of the Communist Youth Union of China, and the comments, and draws the following conclusions: under the call and guidance of the dominant culture, youth groups are no longer confined to their original niche subcultural circles, they add elements of positive energy such as patriotism, and show a certain tendency towards the dominant culture. Members of the dominant culture also takethe initiative to break down barriers and use the symbols of the youth Internet subculture to get youth groups to adopt the values and cultural concepts of the dominant society. Both cultures have gone from erecting barriers of opposition at the initial stage to actively approaching, discussing and interacting with each other, and the mutual reconciliation between the youth Internet subculture and the dominant culture gradually forms a balanced and harmonious mode of living together - the two cultures influence each other and develop separately, cautiously interact and boldly innovate. This study identifies the types of youth Internet subcultures in China, and the findings enrich the research ideas of the relationship between subcultures and dominant cultures, have certain theoretical significance as well as practical significance for the management and good development of youth Internet subcultures in China.

The haunting of classics in the Dark Academia aesthetic

Abstract This article explores the online aesthetic ‘Dark Academia’ from the perspective of Classical reception. Dark Academia became popular during the COVID-19 era as an internet subculture revolving around bookishness, university culture, the Gothic, and the Classical. From its beginning as a Tumblr fandom around Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992), Dark Academia has grown to reach millions of followers worldwide across numerous social media platforms. This article argues that we can think of Dark Academia’s reception of Classics as a ‘haunting’ as defined by James Uden in Spectres of Antiquity (2020), made up of fragmentary, disconnected references — similar to the reception of Classics in Gothic literature. Dark Academia’s reception, however, is twofold: a reception of Classical antiquity itself, but also of the academic discipline of Classics. As such, the field is twice implicated. Classics must address Dark Academia both as a potential gateway for attracting interest in the ancient world, but also as another phenomenon that reflects and amplifies its own pernicious disciplinary legacy.

Research on The Influence of Internet Subculture on The Values of Young College Students

Internet subculture has novel forms and diverse contents, providing college students with a free space to vent their emotions, release stress, and seek recognition. It has a strong appeal to young college students and affects the formation and change of college students' values. In terms of the formation of college students' beliefs and its impact on faith education, Internet subculture has a dual aspect. It not only has a positive role in promoting the transformation of faith education in communication methods and promoting the advancement of communication content with the times, but it can also produce deconstruction and resistance to the orientation of mainstream faith values. Negative effect. In-depth disclosure of the impact of Internet subculture on college students' faith education, and then proposing corresponding countermeasures, has become an important topic in deepening and innovating the research on college students' faith education in the Internet era. We should change our thinking, change the problem perspective into the advantage perspective, and look at Internet subculture and its impact rationally. Starting from the four aspects of society, cyberspace, universities and college students themselves, we should build an educational synergy to lead the healthy development of Internet subculture, standardize its communication platform, give full play to the positive impact of Internet subculture, and weaken its negative impact. In order to deal with Internet sub-culture provide targeted countermeasures to influence the values of college students.

Child Pornography and Internet Subcultures in India - A Legal Perspective

Objectives: The primary objective of this study is to shed light on the pervasive issue of child pornography on the internet and its detrimental impact on children globally. The research aims to investigate the rise of child pornography online, emphasizing its role in the sexual exploitation and misuse of children. Through a comprehensive analysis, the study seeks to uncover the various dimensions of this disturbing phenomenon.
 
 Methods: To achieve the stated objectives, the research employs a multifaceted approach. The study begins by exploring the enthusiastic engagement of children with the internet, emphasizing their use for learning, play, and communication. Subsequently, the dark aspects of cyberspace are examined, focusing on the prevalence of child pornography and its potential physical consequences. The second half of the paper delves into an investigation of legislative measures and government initiatives in India designed to combat child pornography.
 
 Results: The findings of this study reveal a concerning reality regarding the proliferation of child pornography as a thriving business with far-reaching consequences for children worldwide. The results highlight the urgent need to address the issue comprehensively, considering the intersection of technology, legislation, and societal awareness. Additionally, the study provides insights into the effectiveness of specific governmental initiatives in India, contributing to a broader understanding of the challenges and opportunities in combating child pornography.
 
 Conclusion: In conclusion, while acknowledging the efforts made by legislative measures and government initiatives in India, this study discusses the limitations of current Indian law in effectively tackling the issue of child pornography. The conclusion emphasizes the necessity of addressing gaps in the legal framework and proposes specific measures to enhance the prevention of child pornography in India. Overall, the study advocates for a comprehensive and proactive approach to safeguarding children in the digital age, considering both national and international perspectives.

Feminist Voices in Boys Love Literature: Subverting Gender Norms and Empowering Women

Boys Love (BL) literature is a creative genre that has become popular online in the past 20 years. It mainly describes the emotional life of homosexuals, especially gay men. It is an important and controversial part of the Internet subculture active among young people. However, contrary to its content, the creators behind BL literature are often non-gay young women. Women create and appreciate BL novels through the Internet to express their demands for aesthetics, pure love, and equality. This kind of gender writing that breaks tradition has a bright spot of feminism, and though this may take a long time, it can help create a more friendly living space for women in a patriarchal society. This article analyzes female writers' subversion of male images in BL novels, thereby proving that BL culture satisfies women's demands for a more profound social status and equal rights and contributes to breaking the patriarchal society.

Internet Subculture: Self-Presentation and Expression of Contemporary College Students

Internet Subculture: Self-Presentation and Expression of Contemporary College Students

Carnival and Loneliness: Embodiment of Emotion in Chinese Youth Internet Subculture (Based on Danmu Culture)

Based on Jenkins’ theory of “participatory culture” and Danmu culture (Bilibili website), the paper explores the reasons for Chinese youth groups’ active participation in Danmu culture and analyses the embodiment of emotions in Chinese youth internet subculture. It is argued that the development of Internet technologies enabled the young generation to have an opportunity to actively participate in the discussion of socio-cultural phenomena online. This act of discussion expresses emotions in the form of Danmu with a strong carnivalesque colouring. However, beneath the mask of the apparent carnival atmosphere lies the real loneliness of youth. These emotions are closely related to the virtual and anonymous nature of the online environment, but they are inseparable from the social context.

Weird Mediation: Deleuze and Guattari on Toxic Internet Subcultures

The article looks at how the Internet can be imagined as a kind of psychedelic technology – in the sense of ‘manifesting’ new realities – through the lens of different ideas associated with Deleuze and Guattari. It considers a darker strain of their ideas and their reception, initially looking back to discussions from earlier cybertheory before taking as its case study the production of ‘microfascist’ subjectivities on the notorious website 4chan – arguably the point of origin of both the ‘alt-right’ and ‘QAnon’. To unpack this case study, the article develops the idea of ‘weird mediation’ (in dialogue with Gilbert Simondon), as well as considering some ‘shamanic’ aspects from Deleuze and Guattari’s thought (in dialogue with Carlos Castenada), which together offer insights and warnings about the power of mind manifesting technologies.

The Research on the Role of Abstract Culture in the Composition of Chinese Virtual Streamer Fans Culture --Taking A-SOUL as an Example

The rapid development of the virtual streamer industry in China in recent years has caused extensive discussions in Chinese Mainstream media. As a corporate virtual streamer group jointly launched by two entertainment giants called ByteDance and YH ENTERTAINMENT, A-SOUL has received widespread concern from many fields in Chinese society. This paper starts from the perspective of Social Identity theory and analyzes the frequent words on the bullet-screen sent by A-SOUL fans in live-streamings as well as the popular comments of A-SOUL related videos, which in order to explore the role of the emerging online language abstract words and the abstract culture behind them in the fan culture of Chinese virtual steamer. The study found that A-SOULs fans has used abstract words to increase exposure for the virtual streamer group, to vent their emotions and to satisfy their own sense of in-group identity. Abstract culture plays an important role in the cultural composition of virtual streamer fans, which has practical significance for the study of Chinese Internet subcultures and emerging online language trends.

Without memory, desire, or sex: contemplating the incel identity

This article proposes a psychoanalytic exploration and interpretation of the incel identity. Through a reading of Melanie Klein's object relations theory and with a particular focus on the theories of Wilfred Bion, the evolution of the incel identity is conceptualised as a product of failed containment and delayed development of a mature psychic mechanism for thinking, firmly rooted in the paranoid–schizoid position. The incel's relationship with women is shown to be characterised by a dependence on psychotic processes and defence mechanisms, and the article concludes with a discussion on the individual's relationship to the incel internet subculture as a basic assumption group. These interpretations are made with reference to examples taken from the transcript of a final video manifesto recorded by a notorious incel prior to his infamous act of fatal misogynistic violence.

“From Stacys to Foids, a Discursive Analysis of the Incel’s Gendered Spectrum of Political Agency”

ABSTRACT Incels are an Internet subculture focused on anti-feminism and extremist political rhetoric. Their ideology is largely based on the idea that men are marginalized within western society, while women wield a majority of “soft political power.” Yet, there has been little exploration on the ways incels codify gender. Though they espouse gender as an ascribed status in binary terms, they portray gender as a stratified dynamic achievement. This research uses data gathered from four popular incel message boards analyzing their “interpretive repertoire,” describing the social position of women based on “doing gender” across 98 separate discussion threads, resulting in approximately 2,760 pages of discussion to analyze. Findings show that Incels use the central metaphor of sex to reference how socio-political power ought to be distributed in society and how women are categorized along a gendered spectrum of political agency that ranks women as either unattainable prizes to be won or dehumanized enemies to be defeated, reifying the Incel community’s lack of agency and their advocating for and approval of gendered violence.

Apollo Online: Apollonian Consciousness in Far-Right Internet Subcultures

The internet has afforded modern culture unprecedented forms of communication, but it has also led to pockets of isolation that reinforce one’s most unconscious impulses. One example of this shadow side of the internet is the proliferation of far-right internet subcultures, which value hyper-rationality while devaluing anything that is seemingly irrational, or, for them, uncomfortably fluid. Rather than fight fire with fire by distantly judging these subcultures, this article explores their potential mythical, archetypal roots. Jungian and archetypal psychology assert that the Greek gods are alive and well as powers and principles in the Western psyche, implying that even internet subcultures unwittingly enact these ancient motifs. This article shows how certain facets of Apollonian consciousness might be pulling the strings of this high-strung demographic. These facets include Apollo’s jealousy, his determination to win at all costs, and his tumultuous love life. Emphasis is paid to how these aspects of Apollo appear broadly in online political discourse and specifically in the subculture of the incel, or “involuntary celibate.” My intention is to show how this dark face of Apollo, the god of music, can also act as a pied piper for a demographic of increasingly disenchanted young men. I conclude with a brief discussion about what mythic figure might be most effective in puncturing this psychological inflation. Although Dionysus, as an archetypal pattern, is Apollo’s complementary opposite, I propose it is Hermes, the god of communication, who must now enter the chat.

The Alienation of Contemporary College Students' Spiritual Life and Its Solution from the Perspective of Internet Subculture

The Alienation of Contemporary College Students' Spiritual Life and Its Solution from the Perspective of Internet Subculture

Fast Forwarding the Past (on Pause): Daniel Lopatin’s Memory Vague and the Hauntological Aesthetic of Vaporwave

This article examines the electronic musician Daniel Lopatin’s experimental audiovisual work Memory Vague (2009), in which the artist compiles and manipulates “dead” media in the form of looping audio tracks and forgotten visual artifacts. In repurposing and redistributing lost media, Lopatin’s work engages with the archival methods of the field of media archeology, Derrida’s concept of hauntology, and the concerns of the internet subculture Vaporwave. Lopatin validates dead media beyond its economic commodity value, thus providing an alternative to the streaming era’s inherent drive toward corporate profit.

Incels on Reddit: A study in social norms and decentralised moderation

This paper examines the challenges of combating misogyny and harmful social norms on the social networking and news site Reddit. Reddit has a long history of hosting racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and otherwise harmful communities. Incels — an Internet subculture that ascribes to deeply misogynistic beliefs — flourished on Reddit before several major subreddits were progressively banned. In this paper, we examine four incel subreddits to understand how the dynamic tensions between Reddit’s site-wide rules and the rules of particular incel subreddits play out in practice. We draw on archived Reddit data to provide a detailed analysis of how incel subreddits adapt to and resist pressure from Reddit and other users to comply with the site-wide rules and develop and maintain their rules and norms. Our study suggests that punitive measures, such as the threat of stricter rules and increased external moderation for explicitly prohibited content and behaviour is insufficient to foster prosocial subreddits. We show how stricter enforcement of the formal site-wide rules did not challenge or displace the underlying ideologies that foster toxic communities. Instead, we find that incels justified their toxic behaviour in the face of heavy external criticism. To cultivate safe and inclusive digital environments, we argue that Reddit must focus on improving the culture of subreddits. We conclude that driving real change when moderation is decentralized requires the committed and supported participation of moderators who can undertake the extensive work of tackling the underlying identity and ideology that brings hateful communities together.

INFLUENTIAL DIGITAL SUBCULTURES IN YOUTH: A POPULAR MUSIC PERSPECTIVE

The purpose of this research was to examine the digital subculture from the standpoint of online popular music for young people. It was important to the younger generation in order to support the expansion of digitalization; specialized customer groups are becoming more prominent and powerful. Until recently, minorities were defined as those under the age of 25. On the other hand, the rise of young people as out-of-the-box thinkers has had a significant impact on society as a whole. Studying digital subculture and online youth popular music using ethnography was an important part of this study. People's everyday lives are impacted by the digital subculture of young popular music, according to the findings. Music and the technology to access it are becoming more important in the lives of young people. Online popular music and the internet subculture of popular music may be seen as new phenomena by today's youth. Subcultures in the online music industry for youth seem to be well-suited to the establishment and replication of strong relationships among communicators via the use of rich media and online communities. Online popular music was said to be an essential event for young people in the popular music community to form friendships and other forms of social networking.

English

This paper adopts a critical discourse analysis in combination with in-depth interviews of 55 people to examine three representative cases of Internet subcultures created and practiced by Chinese netizens from 2009, in order to define the formats, strategies and tactics of these subcultures in relation to the broader mainstream political culture. The paper finds that the Chinese subculturists employ tactics of homophony and neologism made possible by the highly contextual Chinese language; the participants are aware of the appropriation of traditional Confucian ethics by the Party-state to legitimize its rule and devise targeted strategies of resistance accordingly; but their cynical attitude towards the dominant political culture prevents them from affecting real political change beyond mere defiance at the semiotic level.   Key words: State censorship, cultural resistance, subcultures, post-subcultures, Chinese Internet.

From Chads to Blackpills, a Discursive Analysis of the Incel’s Gendered Spectrum of Political Agency

ABSTRACT The term “incel” is a portmanteau of the words “involuntary” and “celibate,” and incels as a group represent a new emergent Internet subculture. Often, they’ve been connected to viewpoints and language that promote toxic masculinity, while encouraging violence against women and minorities. Previous research has often highlighted incels’ views on women and the language used to perpetuate their antifeminist viewpoints and ideology. However, little research has been produced on how incels view themselves and other men. This research uses popular conversations from various incel message boards to qualitatively analyze the discourses incels use to convey the stratification of doing gender within their subculture. Incels use sex as a central metaphor to convey ideas about how power and resources should be distributed in society. Findings suggest that incels use a complex “interpretive repertoire” to describe a gendered spectrum of political agency.

INCELS ON REDDIT: A STUDY IN SOCIAL NORMS AND DECENTRALISED MODERATION

The social news website Reddit has a long history of hosting communities (‘subreddits’) that advocate or encourage white supremacy (Gillespie 2018), disparagement of minority groups (Topinka 2017), and violence against women (Massanari 2017). As a platform that relies heavily on volunteer moderators to self-govern the subreddits (Matias 2016), Reddit has been criticised for failing to adequately enforce its site-wide rules (Gillespie 2018). Incels—an internet subculture that ascribes to deeply misogynistic beliefs—grew in visibility when they developed subreddits on Reddit. After ongoing criticism and media attention about harmful behaviour of incels both on and off the platform, Reddit imposed escalating sanctions and ultimately banned the most visible of these subreddits over a period of several years. In this paper, we focus on the interaction between formal rules and social norms in incel and related subreddits. This paper aims to improve understanding about how problematic norms are contested in (partially-) decentralised systems of content moderation. We examine discourse about moderation to better understand the role of moderation teams in maintaining and changing social norms in their communities and to examine the interaction between these norms and both sitewide and subreddit-specific rules. Our analysis suggests that the threat of prohibition alone is unlikely to be sufficient to drive cultural change in problematic subreddits. We argue that content moderation is an insufficient frame to understand the regulation of harmful communities; real change requires addressing the underlying cultural norms rather than focusing on individual pieces of content.

Abstracts

Abstracts