Place

Cyberspace is convenient for communities who lack an encompassing physical environment to articulate collectivity. Place is used in the construction of communities; it facilitates a collective identity by locating individuals in a shared environment and provides a context for mobilizing community action. While Rave.ca caters primarily to Montreal’s underground electronic music culture, it is also used to promote events and establish social networks in Quebec City, and to a lesser degree Ottawa and Toronto. The fact that Rave is fairly localized (compared to massive social network sites like MySpace and Facebook) makes place highly tangible for members and it is enacted regularly on personal profiles. Members have an “Events Attended” list on their profile; each event is displayed as a hyperlink which opens onto a description of the event in question with a list of attendees and their comments. Attendance lists navigate the online-offline dynamic of Rave.ca by localizing people (however ephemerally) in the same physical place (the event) and then transposing these places into cyberspace. In this way Rave.ca encompasses the diasporic and ephemeral face-to-face encounters and provides a coherent place for community.

Notably, events also seem to stimulate the most comment-posting on personal profiles. In my experience, members frequently leave comments on each other’s profiles just before and after social events, often just simple comments like “It was nice to see you!” Thus member comments transpose offline places online by referencing them on personal profiles. Photos from events which are uploaded onto personal profiles also transpose offline place online through the same referencing of physical places. Members are tagged in images with other Rave friends; these images are hyperlinked to the personal profiles of the individuals in the picture, and to the event’s page on Rave. Hyper linking is, therefore, significant to shared place.

Offline places also seem to stimulate the mobilization of social capital; members leave messages, and these messages recreate place online. Thus, Rave.ca mediates online and offline interactions through the construction of place.

I can’t argue that place is imperative to every community, but I can say that it seems central on Rave.ca for creating a collective identity and for acting communally.

Simply by opening a personal profile on Rave.ca individuals are asserting their presence in a shared virtual space. Every time a member logs in to their account on Rave, the date and time of that login is posted on the user’s profile. These times and dates also serve to locate people in place by identifying when the user was last “here” on Rave. Furthermore, users who are online at the same time are visibly so, thus people can participate in a shared virtual space. There is no instant messaging on Rave, but private messaging and profile comments can establish “real-time” on Rave when both users are online at the same time.

Using social capital

Face-to-face social encounters are difficult in electronic music parties. Usually there is very loud music, dancing, and an extremely festive atmosphere; frequently I am introduced to friends of friends, or meet complete strangers, on the dance floor. These introductions are for the most part incredibly brief. We exchange names and a few anecdotes and continue with the party. Rave.ca mediates these ephemeral encounters by allowing their articulation within an institutionalized place; the social network site, and more particularly, on personal profiles. Most of the comments left on my profile clearly refer to offline encounters, and most of them were left either directly before or after events that the commentator and myself were attending.

Here are three comments left on my profile:

1) “hey you! come to Passeport tonight! I am playing with Mana. my set is 2-3 =)”

(Passeport is a bar in Montreal; Mana is a dj; “playing” refers to djing, also called mixing or spinning, and “set” is the dj’s presentation, usually lasting 1-2 hours)

2) “hi! nice to meet you at CTRL FRK on Saturday with Mikael!”

(CTRL FRK is the name of an event)

3) “Hello Jess ! It's was so nice to see you friday, your energy is amazing :) See you at Psybass ! Peace”

(Psybass is the name of an event)

These comments: crystallize ephemeral social relations, create a sense of place and history, and mobilize cultural and social capital.

Comments on profiles allow the accumulation of what social network theorists are referring to as “bridging” social capital. A distinction has been drawn, for the purpose of measuring social capital, between bridging and bonding social relations. The difference between the two is not complete and the line drawn is sometimes more of a hindrance for understanding online interactions. Bridging social capital refers to casual social relations characterized by low levels of intimacy and moral obligation. Bonding social capital refers to more intimate relations like family and close friends, or more broadly, to people we feel morally obliged to and interact with on a more or less regular basis. Of course, the nature of social relations is probably better described as a spectrum than as mutually exclusive categories. The binary distinction seems to undermine the importance of bridging social capital; presumably bonding social relations are richer in social capital. I would argue that bridging and bonding are simply different, and both are vital to identity and community construction.

The ability to create a list of friends on a profile allows the articulation of complex social networks. Bonding relations create smaller and more coherent groups which are networked through bridging relations to other bonded groups. For example, a tightly knit group of friends create and promote “hardtek” electronic music events. They are linked through bridging social relations to another tightly knit group of friends who organize “psychedelic trance” events. Hardtek and psychedelic trance are hugely different styles of electronic music with significantly different cultural practices. However, as a result of bridging social capital they have succeeded in organizing events together and expanding their own cultural practices by creating pluralist electronic music festivals. Rave.ca has been an important institution for the articulation of these relations because they are made publicly accessible and tangible. By articulating bridging social relations in friend’s lists, and mobilizing them through profile comments, these relations become important community resources.

....

After careful thought, I believe Rave.ca is a social network and not a community. It was by playing with the ideas of cultural capital and social capital that I arrived at this conclusion.

I was contemplating the degree of institutionalization of social relations on Rave.ca and realized that there is virtually none.

Social networks are always hierarchically organized; some individuals have more social capital and cultural capital than others. In the context of Rave.ca, a "highly ranked" member could easily influence his/her social network to change their orientation in respect to underground electronic music. That is, mobilization is more individual than collective, activity on Rave.ca is organized by individuals not unchanging institutions.

Not that we don't imagine a community, regardless of how hollow these musings may be, they do orient our subjective intentions. But there is no external community, only endless networks of social relations, constantly transforming the cultural landscape of Rave.ca.

Social Network or Community?

I've been reading "The Trouble With Community: Anthropological Reflections on Movement, Identity, and Collectivity" (Amit 2002) in an attempt to determine the structuring of social relations and social capital on Rave.ca.

Originally I dove straight into theories of social capital without exploring the field of relations that social capital is activated in. I was forced to back track. Without a conceptualization of the 'structuration' (to borrow Anthony Giddens term) of Rave.ca social relations, that is the play "between structure and agency (and agency and power)" (Giddens 1984: 169), social capital becomes a hollow concept; devoid of significance.


Rave.ca is a self-proclaimed "Nightlife Community", at the outset of my research I simply took this label at face value and began my work from there. It took several comments from others for me to finally clue-in to the completely absence of critical thinking on my part. Community? What does that even mean in our postmodern world of transnationalism, diasporas, and fragmentation? I was pretty familiar with the concept of imagined communities, during my studies I have read both Benedict Anderson and Arjun Appadurai's work on this concept and in retrospect, I had internalized these ideas without any critical questioning. Vered Amit's (2002) "The Trouble with Community" provided me with an intelligent and articulate problematization of imagined communities, as well as offering me directions for a more apt classification of Rave.ca social relations. Social networks, social groups, cultural categories, and communities are all compared and contrasted in the opening chapters of this volume. I spent many days walking around with all these concepts in my head, trying to find my experiences on Rave in them, trying to understand what is actual and what is imagined...


Imagining a community suggests that members of such a community "would not stress simply the possession of certain attributes (material, linguistic,or territorial) but the consciousness of these attributes and their naturalization as essential to group identity" (Amit 2002: 20). However, such an essentialized view of consciousness hides the multiplicity of experiences, identities, and social networks that anyone Rave.ca member may hold. In many ways the idea of cyber "communities" fit nicely with the postmodern notion of diasporas; which, by their very fragmented nature, entail heterogeneity and hybridization. So the question that follows is; how do heterogeneous and diasporic individuals possess a naturalized and essential consciousness?


The answer is, "they probably don't".

The "ideal" and the "actual" seem to be at odds in conceptualizations of imagined communities, and this rupture distances social analysis from uncovering the real impact of social relations in lived worlds. For Amit, community requires the "mobilization of social action" (2002: 18), and cannot, therefore, be found in imaginings alone. This idea of social action as a measure of community, is an important dimension in my exploration of social capital on Rave.ca precisely because I am examining profile activity. Social action on Rave.ca is guided by fairly "sociocentric" norms of cultural capital, yet social capital seems to be enacted in "ego-centric" ways.... I don't dare go further in this vein because my ideas are not fully developed.

I'm thinking that the concept of "cultural category" is a fairly accurate description of underground electronic music; this might explain the sociocentric nature of cultural capital.

Rave.ca is looking less like a community and more like a social network as I continue to break down activity and meaning.

Amit writes that "social network analysis tended to take the individual, rather than the social group, as its point of departure, and so with it came a focus on strategic action, on the cumulative construction of ephemeral webs of social relations which were not likely to outlast their chief protagonist" (2002: 15). This has been particularly troubling for me. I can't determine to what extent, if at all, social relations are institutionalized on Rave.ca. I feel like I'm having trouble seeing past my own preconceived ideas. That I'm wearing rose-colored glasses, naively believing in a world a live in... I feel stuck right here!



Works Cited:

Amit, Vered and Nigel Rapport. 2002. The Problem With Community: Anthropological Reflections on Movement, Identity and Collectivity. London; Sterling,VA : Pluto.

Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Connecting online-offline interactions

Most of my Rave "friends" are not close friends. They are people I have met at events, have partied with, and have gotten to know loosely over the years. Rave keeps us connected. I have over 100 "friends" on my profile from the Montreal rave scene, most of whom I have never spent any initimate time with. And yet I feel very close to these people. The intense ephemeral experiences that we live together on dance floors all over the city (and province) are maintained through brief textual exchanges on Rave. Today, I got an invitation from a Rave "friend" to a Goodbye Party celebrating the closing of a venue that was once the site of many events (a semi-legal residential loft space in Griffintown). This friend would have had no way of inviting me if Rave did not exist. We have never exchanged phone numbers, emails, or any other kind of personal information. We see each other sporadically when our paths cross, and when we do run into each other, the dynamic of our friendship is actually very natural. What I mean, is that even though the quality of this friendship may be "bridging" (to use Ellison et al. 2007 classification scheme) rather than "bonding", my friend and I interact in a relaxed and habitual fashion... that is, like real friends! Essentially Rave provides the technology for virtual as well as face to face networking.

This is our community. Simply being present on the site; having a profile and logging in from time to time, establishes community membership. I do not engage in many intercations with my Rave freinds on a daily, weekly, or even monthly basis. On rare occasions I will leave messages on friend's profiles after seeing them at events and having interesting exchanges with them. Last week I ran into another friend at an event, we talked for awhile over beers and loud music, and the next day he left me a message on my Rave profile. I reciprocated by leaving a comment on his profile. This exchange is significant. By leaving a message on my profile, my friend was reinvigorating our friendship-connection, and my reciprocation was a confirmation of this. Had I not responded, the solidarity of our social tie would not be as strong.

Rave's great strength from my perspective is it's ability to create and maintain social newtorks that would otherwise disolve in the weeks and months of intervening silence between actual electronic music events. It offers a sense of continuity to a nightlife lifestyle which is by it's very nature ephemeral. I'm curious if other Canadian cities have SNSs for their electronic music communities and whether they offer the same degree of community integration? A comparative study would shed light on the specific dynamics of Rave.




Work Cited:

Ellison, Nicole B., Charles Steinfield, and Cliff Lampe. 2007. The Benefits of Facebook "Freinds": Social Capital and College Students Use of Online Social Network Sites. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue4/ellison.html

Rave Culture: the briefest of overviews...

As the story goes, rave culture was introduced to North America by Frankie Bones, a New York based DJ. After "mixing" (DJ'ing) at an all-night rave party in the United Kingdom for thousands of people, Bones returned to New York and began telling everyone about his intense experience and constructing a rave movement. In the early 90s he threw a series of raves in different underground venues of Brooklyn. (Underground venues can range from non-commercial establishments to disaffected factory spaces, but essentially, they are transient and fluid). At one of these initial rave parties a fight broke out and Bones stopped mixing, jumped up on a table and yelled "Show some peace, love, and unity, or I'll break your f**king faces". The fight stopped and the event lingered in the minds of attendees, to be furthered discussed and developed on alt.rave. "P.L.U.R" was the outcome (Peace, Love, Unity, Respect), and it became the motto of North American rave culture.

Thus, even in its beginnings, rave culture can be linked to the internet, itself a neonate at the time. In fact, the anonymity of internet communication is perfectly adapted to rave culture. All night partying, drugs, and illegal/underground venues are socially stigmatized by mainstream cultural values. The internet provides a safe contexts for elaborating marginal aspects of identity. As John M. Ingham notes, "In modern/postmodern societies, individuals play various roles and encounter diverse and often unexpected situations. Thus, they may have various personas, and they may actively experiment with wearing different "masks" as they try to cope with social exigencies" (1996: 102).

Rave.ca, which was created in 1998, is specifically oriented to the Montreal rave community. It provides an effective forum for individuals involved in the rave community to give shape and substance to their rave identities. It also facilitated the dissemination of otherwise difficult to obtain information like the dates and locations of planned underground events. Because the locations of raves constantly changes and are often illegal, promoters frequently announce the location only 24 hours before the party. This protects parties from impromptu police raids and busts, as well as lending a degree of mystery and excitement to raves.

"Ravers" frequently describe their first rave experience like a rite of passage, that is, as an intense and ritualistic experience impacting identity, social position, and values, and marking the transition of the self from one stage to another. First experiences are also a common narrative between members of the rave community and establish links between members. Rave.ca provides a forum for these narratives, in actual raves the excessively loud music and dark lighting discourage story telling and narrative bonding. In my experience of meeting people at raves, encounters are almost entirely based on body language; dancing with someone, exchanging smiles, etc. A day or two after the rave, members of rave.ca go online and try to find these new "friends" in the cyber-community where they can use textual and hypertextual practices to elaborate their social connection and recount narratives.

Rave culture has its own codes, strategies, and value systems; these have been supported from the very beginning by virtual communities. Cyber-identities and rave-identities are (usually)peripheral identities, worn like masks at night and behind closed doors (or computer screens). In fact, I believe it would have been virtually impossible for rave culture to be sustained for almost 20 years now without social network sites to allow its elaboration.



Work Cited:

Ingham, John, M. 1996 Psychological Anthropology Reconsidered. Cambridge University
Press.

Social Network Profiles

I log in.
Immediately a new screen appears with my personal setting options, this is my social network profile's administrative page, the behind the scenes of my visible profile.
Change the color of your background, change your name, your 'face', your interests; add a poem, a journal entry, or an article. There are so many options to personalize your profile, express yourself, and project yourself as 'someone' into the cyber community.
These profiles we wear like skins; cells die and are replaced, same as avatars and photos.

There's a "mood" option, much like Facebook's "what are you doing right now", except that there is a 20 character maximum. My mood appears next to my avatar in the upper left corner of the the screen, alongside my name, age, and geographical location. It's like a micro-profile on my profile page: immediately accessible, no scrolling down, "me" in a nutshell.

Immediately underneath this "micro-profile" there is information regarding my activity on the site. The date and time of my last login are recorded, the number of profile views I have accumulated, as well as "coolness" points which increase with increased activity in the virtual community. Thus when I click on my "coolness" points I see the break down:

Community Thread Starters:

20

Community Messages:

385

Events Images:

4,760

Flyers Images:

0

Gallery Images:

432

Friends:

2,750

Events Attending:

4,925

Events Posted:

20

Events Modified:

5

Profile Owner:

100

Total:

13,397

The more people participate in the community; start discussions in the public forum, announce events, upload music and pictures, and make friends, the cooler they are. I doubt that "coolness" points directly motivate people to act on this site, but they are an indirect reminder of how active an individual has been in "the scene" (the underground electronic music scene) and thus an important indicator of status and prestige.


Wow! I feel like I could write a paper on every function!!!

More later, I have to get to class.