Thornton: Taste Cultures
While Hebdige draws attention to affinity groups' reworking of things into artifacts of style, Sarah Thornton, in her study of the 1990s British techno music dance club and rave scene called Club Cultures, highlights the ways that subcultures use everyday objects to create new modes of social engagement. In the present day, as it becomes increasingly common for people to join online communities via social media sites, the observation that subcultures create entertaining forms of group participation may seem obvious. But Thornton lays out a set of concepts and terms that prove as useful today for understanding how subcultures create modes of online interactivity as they were fifteen years ago for comprehending the face-to-face techno club and rave scene.
Thornton categorizes club culture as a type of “taste culture." Taste cultures, Thornton writes, "congregate on the basis of their shared taste. . . , their consumption of common media and, most importantly, their preference for people with similar tastes to themselves." Taking part in a particular taste culture “socializ[es] participants into a knowledge of (and frequently a belief in) the likes and dislikes, meanings and values of the culture." These cultures are not often permanent institutions of affiliation; rather, they are “ad hoc communities with fluid boundaries which may come together and dissolve over a single summer or endure for a few years."Also, taste cultures are “riddled with cultural hierarchies," such as, in the example of club cultures, the privileging of what is considered authentic over what is deemed phoney, the hip over the mainstream, and the underground over the media.7
What Thornton describes here are the social innovations of fandoms. Thornton's taste cultures can also be called fan cultures, and these types of groups coalesce around certain objects, which can be “common media" such as music, films, television programs, and comic books but can also be other types of commodities. Around these commodities, fans build societies with particular hierarchies, values, and belief systems. A great deal of the work of fans consists of the construction of the rules and codes of participating in fan cultures; fans moderate the interactions of other fans, establish the terms of the fans' discussions and play (e.g., make clear what is authentic versus phoney), and initiate and teach newcomers to the fandom. Status games—the struggle for newbies to become “big name fans" or moderators in a community, or the struggle for a faction of fans who wish to modify the group's value system to gain recognition—are common in fandoms and provide a great deal of the emotional interest and entertainment for community
Fandom as Free Labor
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