Theorizing the Web is right around the corner! This post is a short overview of my paper, “Textual Community: Finding Belonging in the Manosphere.” It’s part of the “Politics of Platforms” panel, C5 on Saturday, April 16th from 1:30-2:45 PM.
Our social worlds are increasingly augmented, dependent on both online and offline interaction. While community building offline depends heavily on face-to-face interaction and relatively stable, anchored identities, online communities have some unique characteristics. “Knowing” another member of your online community may come more from usernames or avatars than given names used in our offline interactions. Solidifying community beliefs and ideals doesn’t rely on church sermons or PTA meetings, but from popular blog posts and digitally-afforded hierarchies. One way to theorize these differences is a focus on texts, the ways they circulate, and ways they shape shared community worldviews.
I propose the concept textual community to describe the dynamics of digital belonging. A few definitions can help flesh out the concept. First, text itself merits some attention. Texts are fragments of what rhetoric scholar Michael McGee (1990) calls “apparently finished discourse.” An apparently finished discourse is a fluid, semi-stable collection of text fragments that allows people to make meaning out of otherwise disparate or incomplete signs.
These fragments are composed of a signifier—the entirety of the discourse that is represented—and a signified—the meaning we take away from the text relative to the discourse. Text fragments are situated within three structural relationships: fragment and apparently finished discourse, fragment and culture, and fragment and influence. For McGee, this model is a means of keeping a text anchored in its context—of reading the text within a universe of meaning and understanding the dialectical relationship among texts and discourses.
For my purposes, texts online consist of blogs, videos, memes, social media and forum posts, comments, and similar scraps of discourse that circulate in online spaces. Anyone who has ever stumbled upon an obscure or insular online community full of unintelligible jargon and nonsensical memes knows just how important McGee’s definition is. On the other hand, anyone who has found a community that resonates with you, that you want to be a part of, has had the experience of combing through the texts that circulate there.
This dynamic is key to the form textual communities take online, and platforms play an enormous role in determining the ways texts circulate. To define community, I rely on Ferdinand Tönnies’ concepts gemeinschaft and gesselschaft. Tönnies’ concepts translate roughly to community and society, in which community refers to voluntary associations based on shared values and beliefs and society refers to indirect, impersonal interactions based in necessity. Tönnies’ dichotomy is not so much a straightforward binary, but a dialectical tension or spectrum on which human associations can be evaluated.
Textual communities are characterized by voluntary, personal interactions based on shared values in beliefs, which are stabilized, perpetuated, and changed via the circulation of texts. Some texts circulate widely and often, becoming key signifiers for the community. Others may come and go quickly with varying degrees of influence on the community. In highly structured communities, texts may be centralized and canonized via a specific platform’s affordances. In others, texts may be more dispersed and difficult to find or understand, raising the barriers to entry for outsiders.
These types of communities are widespread online, from fandoms sharing their favorite fics to political and activist groups sharing articles. The community of A Song of Ice and Fire fans has always fascinated me; in their subreddit they reference past posts or prominent users, they build massive and remarkably comprehensive wikis, and they read and re-read the books looking for morsels of insight into characters and plot. And, of course, they share it with each other, have text-based discussions, make memes, and on and on.
Not every online community is textual; raiding parties on WoW or forums for cat owners may build a strong sense of community without circulating texts that shore up ideologies and values. Similarly, not every textual space online is a community. I think few people would argue that Reddit’s r/funny is communal in Tönnies’ sense, despite the text-based premise of the subreddit.
Textual communities may have varying levels of hierarchy, structure, and intelligibility to outsiders. One example of a highly structured textual community is Reddit’s The Red Pill (TRP) and its related subreddits. Briefly, TRP is a neo-masculist community—part of the Manosphere—that trains men in self improvement and dating strategies predicated on natural male dominance. In less than four years, The Red Pill has accumulated just under 150,000 subscribers, thanks in part to its low barriers to entry.
Using Reddit’s side bar feature, TRP makes basic community and pedagogical texts easily available to new comers. It is also a hierarchical community that utilizes the affordances of the Reddit platform to demarcate not only moderators, but also the TRP vanguard and “elders” or experts in the community. Furthermore, karma accumulation indicates how valued a member’s contributions are.
Another textual community from my own research is 4chan, specifically r9k, with very little structure and high barriers to entry. There is no helpful sidebar of introductory texts, and conversations on 4chan can be quite alien to outsiders. This is no accident. Creating an insular community requires jargon and concepts that are not easily available to outsiders. In fact, users lament the advent of websites like Know Your Meme or Encyclopedia Dramatica that allow non-users to familiarize themselves with the memes that circulate in these communities. Additionally, the fast-changing memetic discourse on many 4chan boards also makes it difficult to keep up unless you are always on, always watching and shitposting.
My goal with a concept like textual communities is two fold. First, it offers a theoretical center for understanding community dynamics as they relate to platforms. Anonymity, voting, and archiving are just some of the various platform affordances that can dramatically shape the form communities take. But it also offers a methodological inroad for studying these communities.
At last year’s TtW I presented on Nick Couldry’s (2000) concept “textual environments” and “reading formations” as a method for analyzing texts not as individual scraps of culture, but as moments in a larger flow that moves across space and time. With this approach, and for textual communities broadly, a blog post is not merely its content, but how and where it was shared (post vs. sidebar), how users were able to interact with it (comments, voting), and how it was received by community members as a valuable contribution to shared beliefs and values. This work builds on my earlier TtW presentation, and on my dissertation research broadly.
Britney tweets!