England May 22-28

He will pour me a drink. He will.

Because Charlie is heading to England and I am a poacher, I’m hopping on board for a trip to London and Bristol. We’ll be in London May 22-26 and then Bristol until the 28th. He’ll remain on for his sister’s wedding, but I’ll make myself scarce to head back to NYC.

We’ll hang in London, meet some people, rent a flat in hipstery Shoredich, and then take a train to Bristol, where we will drink (with the barkeep above) and drive (not at the same time) a rental car to Bath.  Or the Henge.  Or both.  Who the hell knows.

Then, on June 1, out to LA for E3. Be sure to hit me up if you’re in other place. Or not. Just hit me up. Because I like being hit. Up.

Escape To Cyberia: Subcultures as Agents of Change

Escape To Cyberia:
Subcultures as Agents of Change

Joshua A. Fruhlinger

Copyright 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2009 Joshua A. Fruhlinger; University of Chicago

Note: This is my graduate thesis, originally written in 1994 when the Internet was the stuff of UNIX command lines, LYNX, and a couple dudes in California starting a “portal” called “Yahoo!”.  You’ll find delicious words like “cyberpunk” and Internet frontiers like Usenet and IRC.  We were all wide-eyed then.  Currently, the references are dead.  If you have any particular reference requests, feel free to drop me a line and I should be able to dig it up for your reading pleasure.

…

My gratitude to David Laitin for helping me sort out my normally entropic thoughts, Kristin Croteau for finding every possible flaw in my premise and making me come up with answers, and Daniel Schatzman for raising possibilities even I hadn’t thought of.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Here comes my thesis

University of Chicago in 1901 (no, I'm not that old)

In 1994, graduate students at the University of Chicago studied real things like shifts in finite resources, institutions and cultural change, and social inequality in Spielberg’s films.  It should come as no surprise, then, that more than one faculty members were not so supportive of my decision to study a thing called “The Internet.”  What’s more, I was studying it as a social space.

“People don’t really interact online!” I was told.

I set out to prove them wrong, and to show that the Internet was not only a place where people can feel social, but also a place where people were forming real social groups like subcultures.  Heck, I even found that it was a place where actual cultural shifts could occur!

Turns out I was sort of right.

In a couple upcoming articles here, I will republish my graduate thesis entitled: “Escape to Cyberia: Subcultures as Agents of Change” for your reading – and giggling – pleasure.  In it you will find such delicious terms as “netiquette” and early uses of “spam.”  Yes, we had spam back then.

Enjoy.