In the book he starts out with Socrates and Taoism and traces the counter culture strain up until the late 80s/early 90s, touching on a handful of the bigger movements. It definitely provides an interesting context to think about the concept of counter culture movements and what the term really means.

I’m glad you used ‘scare quotes’ (not the best term here, but the one I know.)

The distinction between the ‘real’ and ‘online’ worlds is becoming increasingly meaningless. I find all my music online. I buy and/or download all my music online. If something is happening with regards to music, and it’s not online, it’s not ‘real.’ (At least, to me.)

This kind of activity stands kind of in contrast to active resistance in avatar-based online environments, though, which are supposed to mimic the way we might act in the real world. Compared to a semi-organized movement on the web, you might not get a massive number of protesters/activists in a single place in Second Life (which I believe has processor limits to how many avatars can occupy a single space at a single time), but you will get people mimicking the embodied protest methods of the “real” world. Avatar-based venues also enable somewhat shocking forms of protest that you can inflict upon others in ways you couldn’t do in the physical world, like attacking a person with flying genitalia or getting intentionally killed in a war game.

Again, though, these sorts of activities are most effective when they “leave” the internet, like being reported on in other media. I doubt there’s much effectiveness in guilt-tripping kids playing America’s Army while they’re in the middle of playing the game, though as protest-oriented performance art goes, it’s an interesting example to ponder.

2) That linked post by Kelty is priceless—thanks. This is why I have been trying to submit to journals that publish online or otherwise allow for easy access (still waiting on results). I hear that online publication is less attractive for your job/tenure prospects, but would I really want to work for a school that wants to hire a “new media” person but doesn’t put any stock in the legitimacy of said media?

The best analogy I could come up with is that the ‘cyber resistence’ of today is less like the anti-war protests of the ’60′s and more like practices such as squatting. It’s implementing your ideals regardless of what the current legal framework is. The fact that it usually happens in the nooks and cranies of the net both engenders and obscures this fact.

Side discussion that led to some quite eye-opening conversations with academic friends; WTF is up with having to pay $12 to Anthro Source to find out what ‘recursive public’ means? Trying to google around the damage led to this illuminating link: http://savageminds.org/2005/05/24/recursive-public-irony/

Second, I had totally forgotten about the Digg rebellion (which I even wrote about). You could probably argue that it wasn’t totally confined to the net—I saw some t-shirts, for example—but yeah, it was blogs and YouTube videos and such that really made the difference. Again, one could argue that this isn’t properly “resistant” because it was about supporting the underlying consumer mentality that the content industries do want to encourage. Phrasing it in terms of the “Streisand effect”, while still referring to consumption of entertainment, at least speaks to trying to replace an ideology of top-down control of content with one of bottom-up control. Looked at another way, we might see this as trying to replace a sort of “Orwellian Lite” view of information management (in which the people in power can redefine history through censorship) with a “free information” view (in which people deserve access to information even if potentially damaging to those in power).

I think you could argue that this was starting before the internet, and maybe shares some common ground with fan fiction. But I also think that the internet makes it possible for this ideology to be more widespread as never before.

And finally, I’d argue that Second Life protests do count, as do protesters intentionally getting shot in America’s Army. Ironically, I went into this post thinking so specifically of the internet as the web that it kind of eluded me that it does involve some “embodied” spaces of its own. That said, I think that geeky activism has a better potential to reach non-geeky audiences when it takes its messages offline, at least for now. Maybe that will change in the future when, metaphorically speaking, everybody exists in the Matrix, not just as passing tourists, and everyone knows nerds are the elite who can jump across buildings.

http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2007/09/international-u.html

Naturally, there’s a flip side. Meet virtual Blackwater:

http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2007/09/guarding-newt-s.html

(Side thought: is there a ‘Striesand Effect’ outside of the internet?)

OT, but of general interest, see this blog entry over at Time:
http://time-blog.com/nerd_world/2007/09/the_great_nerd_culture_gap.html