Information from Link to Link, and from Mouth to Mouth

I feel stupid and contagious,
Here we are now: entertain us.

The Bricoleurs

Vbox7, YouTube, Facebook, and even blogs, rarely produce news. As Geert Lovink notes (Lovink, G. 2007), the chances of finding bloggers committed to carrying out independent journalistic research are slim. What online platforms do is emit a thick cloud of impressions around given news and let loose the public opinion. News are extracted from the closed circle of the traditional media and released in the open Internet space. Here, they grow thick with opinions, comments, and interpretations. It is rather telling which news arouses the interest of Internet users. The Facebook cause "Miss Bulgaria 2009 is a crocodile" might turn out to be a lot more exciting for them than the economic crisis. New media are clockwork media. It is never known for certain which news would detonate the public opinion.

The relation traditional – new media may be examined through the strategies – tactics dichotomy offered by Michel de Certeau (Certeau, M. 2002). Newspapers and television constitute the official discourse, the neutral point of view. Internet users creatively consume, use the official messages. In this case these are not necessarily technologies of resistance. Video websites offer a perfect example at hand. There we see the political entering the field of the quotidian, the entertaining, the personal reading. In other words, new media enable us to take the well-known faces out of their institutional context and plug them into self-contrived plots and narrative configurations; to act as bricoleurs at their expense and deal with the available in unexpected ways.

There are more than half a million large panel and reinforced concrete dwellings in Bulgaria, their exterior rehabilitation (known as sanirane in Bulgarian) being subject to public policies from above and business initiatives from below. These relations of interdependence could be either in conflict or in agreement. The conflict goes deeper than it seems because the state provides mostly for the normative regulation of the process, whereas the financial burden is carried by the flat owners sharing floor ownership of the building. This is all specified both in the European and in the national legislative framework, and will be further elaborated in a comprehensive set of sublegislative acts. The lack of agreement has produced visual effects in the urban space, particularly in its periphery.

When I first visited Dimitrovgrad in 2005, the impression of a large town marketplace spreading out to all parts of the town seemed to hang all over the place. The interurban bus pulled up on the street leading to the marketplace, and the procession of cars heading that way did not end until the small hours of the day. The vendors opened their stands at two o’clock in the morning, and the dark alleys hustled and bustled with people. As if the marketplace, once forced out of the town, along the railway tracks, had slowly but steadily spread beyond the farm land where it stood; it had taken over the old sports hall and was making its way into the residential blocks of flats. As if the impression of invasion was dictated by the sentiments shared by the vendors themselves – the marketplace was shameful and dirty, even if indispensable and real. Dimitrovgrad, the town of the youth, “the beating heart of the industry”, had become the town with the largest open-air marketplace in 1990. The impression changed when I revisited the marketplace in 2008 – getting off the train, I found a seemingly more tamed and hidden marketplace with changed working hours. There is a deeper change in the structure of capital behind this change on the surface, which I will try to analyze here.

Subcultures, identity, and practices of the self

This article seeks to prove that describing contemporary subcultures as forms of identity, or of resistance, as researchers have been inclined to do in the last couple of decades, is somewhat problematical. I will try to show that subcultures can be thought of as specific forms of care of the self instead. With this aim in mind, I will analyze the practices pertaining to the vandalizing of a drinking fountain in the village of Tranak, as represented in a couple of video clips.

What happens to subcultural formations when they enter the cyberspace? And how does online communication alter connections and identification with the group? Are there new forms of community in the digital phase of youth cultures, and can they be related to the theoretical insights about postmodern fluid identities and ephemeral belongings? This text continues the reflections about the new forms of post-subcultural communities, bringing together some theoretical insights about virtual identity, existing studies of virtual communities, and the results of a research on the internet forums of subcultural groups in Bulgaria.

Turtles mating; a man in a gorilla suit, banging his head against a fence; a baby dancing samba. These are only few of the most watched “contagious” video clips in Web 2.0 – the utopia of civic participation. In 1992 Karl Bernstein, one of the journalists who uncovered the Watergate affair, wrote a polemical piece on the culture of idiocy. Bernstein criticized the tabloidization of the media, the lack of investigative journalism, and the unprecedented success of “yellow” TV shows (Bernstein 1992). Eighteen years later, with the advent of the video social networks in our life, the idiot culture is coming of age. A coming of age that we ourselves are to be blamed for.