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This goes beyond music honestly. All forms of media used to have a kind of social underground or niche. Remember when you played that one video game you found o

by Ethee 3mo ago

This goes beyond music honestly. All forms of media used to have a kind of social underground or niche. Remember when you played that one video game you found on a video retailers shelf and couldn't wait to tell your friends all about it the next day knowing for a fact that none of them had ever heard of the game before? How about when you found that basement horror film randomly made by the guy from the next town over? There are so many small niche forms of media that used to speak to us and now all of them have to sink or swim against the millions upon millions of pieces being shared on social media every day. The effort the author describes here in finding these pieces really was part of experiencing them and in our new extra-social and commodified world I'm not sure many would go out of their way in that same way any more. Which is a shame.

jnovek 3mo ago
“All forms of media used to have a kind of social underground or niche.” These things and their corresponding communities still exist, they’re just not big presences in the mainstream internet places like TikTok where they are overwhelmed by more popular options. It’s much like how you wouldn’t find an underground record at Sam Goody in the 90s.
- Ethee 3mo ago
  I mean yes and no right? I think the nature of how open the internet is and how easily you can find any information you expend the effort to kind of lends itself towards the loss of this type of 'underground' culture. For example I spend a lot of time in the LA rave scene. A lot of people here who have been here for a long time will talk about how the 'old underground' for raves was really where it's at. But honestly that culture never really 'died' in-so-much as it was changed and altered by the newcomers to the space some of whom might have never found said culture without the proliferation of it through the internet. There will always be small niche communities for all sorts of media, but it'll never be 'underground' again in the same way this article presents.

by Ethee 3mo ago

jnovek 3mo ago

“All forms of media used to have a kind of social underground or niche.” These things and their corresponding communities still exist, they’re just not big presences in the mainstream internet places like TikTok where they are overwhelmed by more popular options. It’s much like how you wouldn’t find an underground record at Sam Goody in the 90s.

Ethee 3mo ago
I mean yes and no right? I think the nature of how open the internet is and how easily you can find any information you expend the effort to kind of lends itself towards the loss of this type of 'underground' culture. For example I spend a lot of time in the LA rave scene. A lot of people here who have been here for a long time will talk about how the 'old underground' for raves was really where it's at. But honestly that culture never really 'died' in-so-much as it was changed and altered by the newcomers to the space some of whom might have never found said culture without the proliferation of it through the internet. There will always be small niche communities for all sorts of media, but it'll never be 'underground' again in the same way this article presents.