Common Culture of Umeå

I was invited to give a talk this Saturday at the free culture festival Common Culture of Umeå. I presented some of the results from my research project about cultures of online piracy, and concluded with discussing a set of theoretical concepts relating to the field of participatory culture in general. This event was a great opportunity to talk about, and discuss, issues that I do research on with young people that take an active part in such subcultures that interest me from the academic perspective.

It was inspiring to see that my research results and perspectives seemed to converge with their ways of thinking, even though we have come into this field from different directions, and navigate it in different ways. I have been toying for some time with the idea of writing something about what I would call “subcultural innovation”, and this experience fuelled these ideas even more.

The economy of linguistic exchange in gaming culture

I was interviewed today by Språktidningen, a Swedish monthly magazine about language issues. The article for which I was contacted will be printed in the January edition and deals with the specialized language in gaming culture, and the difficulties for game reviewers and cultural journalists to make games accessible to a wide audience of people of various generations.

This dilemma is further emphasized in a non-English speaking setting, where gaming discourse not only includes a lot of specialized terminology but also a lot of loan words. I think that gaming language must be seen in the context of sub or youth cultural language. This means that specialized jargon has been developed for reasons other than purely technological. Furthermore, many online cultures related to gaming are quite hierarchal and langue plays a big part in maintaining distinctions in these cases. As gaming is moved into the mainstream, these linguistic patterns live on. My contribution to the article, from the perspective of cultural sociology, revolved around the following points:

Dick Hebdige illustrated in Subculture: The meaning of style (1979) that membership in subcultures is signalled through specific uses of mannerisms and argot. Argot is a French, Spanish and Catalan word for “slang” or “secret language”. Argot is used by various groups “to prevent outsiders from understanding their conversations”. “The term argot is also used to refer to the informal specialized vocabulary from a particular field of study, hobby, job, sport, etc”.¹

“Notions concerning the sanctity of language are intimately bound up with social order. The limits of acceptable linguistic expression are prescribed by a number of apparently universal taboos. These taboos guarantee the continuing ‘transparency’ (the taken-for-grantedness) of meaning. Predictably then, violations of the authorized codes through which the social world is organized and experienced have considerable power to provoke and disturb” (Hebdige 1979, p. 91).

Cultures such as those characterizing gaming, online piracy, IRC chats, hacking, etc. are often hierachal. The status divisions between n00bs and more established members in online culture in general are one example of this. Bowker and Liu (2001) have written about this in terms of gender differences, and Blashki & Nichol (2005) have illustrated how so called 1337 5p34k (leetspeak) has its roots in gaming culture.

Pierre Bourdieu writes in the seminal article on “The economy of linguistic exchanges” (1977) of “legitimate language”, and of how language is connected to “relations of symbolic power”.

“A person speaks not only to be understood but also to be believed, obeyed, respected, distinguished.” (p. 648)

“Linguistic competence (like any other cultural competence) functions as linguistic capital in relationship with a certain market.” (p. 651)