Editing Counterculture (section)

=== Definition and theory ===
Digital countercultures are online communities, and patterns of tech usage, that significantly deviate from mainstream culture. To understand the elements that shape digital countercultures, its best to start with Lingel's classifications of mainstream approaches to digital discourse: "[T]hat online activity relates to (dis)embodiment, that the Internet is a platform for authenticity and experimentation, and that web-based interactions are placeless."<ref name=Lingel17>{{Cite book|last=Lingel|first=Jessa|url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/982287921|title=Digital countercultures and the struggle for community |publisher=[[MIT Press|The MIT Press]]|date=2017|isbn=978-0-262-34015-1|location=Cambridge, Massachusetts|pages=21|oclc=982287921}}</ref>

==== Disembodiment ====
The basis for online disembodiment is that, contrary to the corporeal nature of offline interactions, a user's physical being does not have any relevance to their online interactions. However, for users whose physical existence is [[Social exclusion|marginalized]] or shaped by counterculture (ex: gender identities outside the [[Gender binary|binary]], ethnic minorities, [[Punk subculture|punk culture]]/fashion), their lived experiences build a subjectivity that carries over into their online interactions. As put by [[Shaka McGlotten]]: "[T]he fluidity and playfulness of [[cyberspace]] and the intimacies it was supposed to afford have been punctuated by corporeality."<ref>{{Cite book|last=McGlotten|first=Shaka|url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/864139116 |publisher=State University of New York Press |title=Virtual intimacies : media, affect, and queer sociality|date=2013|isbn=978-1-4619-5242-8|location=Albany|pages=3|oclc=864139116}}</ref>

==== Authenticity and experimentation ====
Arguments that the Internet is a platform for authenticity and experimentation highlight its role in the creation or enhancement of identities. This approach asserts that norms of non-virtual social life restrict users' ability to express themselves fully in person, but online interactions eliminate these barriers and allow them to identify in new ways. One means by which this exploration takes place is online "identity tourism," which allows users to appropriate an identity without any of the offline, corporeal risks associated with that identity. A critique of this form of experimentation is that it gives the "tourist" a false impression that they understand the experiences and history of that identity, even if their Internet interactions are superficial.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Lingel|first=Jessa|url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/982287921 |publisher=The MIT Press |title=Digital countercultures and the struggle for community|date=2017|isbn=978-0-262-34015-1|location=Cambridge, Massachusetts|pages=25|oclc=982287921}}</ref> Moreover, it is especially harmful when used as a means to deceptively masquerade oneself to appeal to digital counterculture communities. However, especially for countercultures that are marginalized or demonized, experimentation can allow users to embrace an identity that they align with, but hide offline out of fear, and engage with that culture.

==== Placelessness ====
The final approach is on online communication as placeless, asserting that the consequences of geographic distance are rendered null and void by the Internet. Lingel argues that this approach is [[Technological determinism|technologically determinist]] in its assumption that the placelessness provided by access to technology can single-handedly remedy [[structural inequality]]. Moreover, Mark Graham states that the persistence of spatial metaphors in describing the Internet's societal impact creates "a dualistic offline/online worldview [that] can depoliticize and mask the very real and uneven power relationships between different groups of people."<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Graham|first=Mark|date=2012-10-25|title=Geography/Internet: Ethereal Alternate Dimensions of Cyberspace or Grounded Augmented Realities?|url=https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2166874 |journal=The Geographical Journal|language=en|location=Rochester, NY|pages=9|ssrn=2166874}}</ref> Subscribing to this perceived depoliticization prevents an understanding of digital countercultures. Socio-cultural, power hierarchies on the Internet shape the mainstream, and without these mainstreams as a point of comparison, there are no grounds to define digital counterculture.