Item Details

Emo online: networks of sociality/networks of exclusion

Issue: Vol 11 No. 2 (2010)

Journal: Perfect Beat

Subject Areas: Popular Music

DOI: 10.1558/prbt.v11i2.141

Abstract:

This article examines Australian emo subcultural practices and new media technologies. I use subcultural studies to analyse whether emo is, indeed, a subculture. I respond to framings of emo as an ‘Other’ (sub)culture, in mainstream Australian media and Australian alternative music scenes. I interrogate whether, as dominant media claims, emo subculturalists’ internet usage inevitably leads to ‘social alienation’. First, I present a case study of a mediatized moral panic concerning the so called ‘emo suicides’ of Jodie Gater and Stephanie Gestier in 2007. Media reports positioned emo adherents as non-normative ‘dark’ users of new technologies, particularly the internet. I counter this representation with a textual analysis of emo micro media, in the form of MySpace homepages, which demonstrate emo sociality online. However, in my final section I look at how such sociality is limited by gate-keeping practices mobilizing discourses of subcultural capital.

Author: Rosemary Overell

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