Mass Culture Devours Subculture!

Subculture has always been the haven for groups of people to come together to explore and codify their own ideas, ethos, and actions separate from the dogma and expectations of the broader culture they live within. Throughout human history, subcultures have played an enormous role in the exploration of human ideas, some of which grow in impact to cause change of a much broader impact.

Prior to our world achieving hyper-mediation (extreme connectedness flooded with rapidly created content), subculture was able to perform its important function to give cover for various groups to explore and refine their ideas and identity. In particular, each generation’s tweens and teens need to create and define their own subculture. It is their job to discover their generation's ideas about what they want the world to become, and who they want to be within it.

By definition, tween and teen subculture is supposed to belong to them. There are often some aspects of it that older generations disapprove of or actively resist. The creation of disruptive, and even distasteful, subculture is one of the ways each generation owns who they are. Promoting a kind of exclusivity with a sense of insider-ness and peer-belonging is normal and healthy. As the up-and-coming new members of society, how else are we to collectively agree on what our impact, messaging, and identity is as we come of age? We can’t do it under the watchful eyes of our parents’ and grandparents’ mass culture.

Much has changed in the last few decades when it comes to how subcultures work. Today, subculture has become the newness currency for mass culture. It is hunted, consumed, remixed, and packaged to add flavor and freshness to everything from entertainment to brands. The time from discovery to appropriation is nearly immediate because most subcultures are shared between its members over social media, and that makes it very visible to trend hunters of all sorts. Subcultures remain sub only for moments, and this defeats much of their purpose and benefit.

This instantaneous devouring of organically conceived subcultures has driven human communities in search of safe places to gather and explore identity and ideas. One of the places they are finding this is fandom. What was once stories reflecting subculture has inverted to become subculture seeking stories.

This puts a whole new spin on the conversation about crafting stories that have relevance. Broad, or mass, relevance is found by understanding where the broader culture is heading and exploring what we all need to continue traveling down that path. However, some stories achieve a vibrant subculture role for a generation because it captures the themes and ideas of their emerging identities, ethos, and desires. The IP holds those ideas in an unchanging state and gives the generational audience the feeling that they understand the story better than everyone else and that it belongs to them. It is a way of coming together as a generational subculture in full view of mass culture, but with some sense of insider ownership. Put simply, it means something more intimate to that generation and they will make use of the story for a long time.

Take Breakfast Club as an example. It is a movie and story that captured and defined the Xer generational subculture of being a teen latch-key kid left adrift in the mid-80’s in search of identity. It resonated with them and gained a rabid fan following.

Harry Potter landed hard for Millennials as a subculture narrative as well. It is interesting to note that there isn’t a subculture defining narrative yet for Gen-Z. Is this because social media is too immediate in devouring those ideas and themes that it won’t happen, or is it that we focus so heavily on mass market that the story hasn’t been written yet?

When looking at fandom through the lens of subculture, this helps to explain why fans seem quite passionate, even touchy, about what they see as too much change being done to their beloved stories. If the story is a refuge for subculture, creating the next sequel or spinoff can make changes that take away the ideas and the reasons why the community of fans/subculture originally came together around it. This isn’t trivial and deserves some effort to understand if that is what’s at work in your fan community.

I believe if we examined some of the longer term and immersive games, we would see some of these subculture and identity behaviors as well.

Net/net, subculture needs its safe spaces, and some of our IP is performing that role. I think there’s real opportunity to look deeply at what certain audience groups need in terms of subculture creation. That is potentially heady material for deeply resonant and relevant story creation.

Hope you enjoyed the discussion about subculture and stories.

Cheers, Kevin