Audiophile Fantasies and the Construction of Desire

In the text, I analyze audiophiles’ posts from Internet forums using four different theoretical traditions: Peter Berger’s and Thomas Luckmann’s sociology of knowledge, Slavoj Žižek’s theory of ideology, Social Construction of Technology approach – SCOT (Trevor J. Pinch and Wiebe Bijker) and Actor-Network Theory – ANT (Bruno Latour and John Law). I argue to view audiophile Internet forums as dynamic symbolic universes, borrowing the term from Berger and Luckmann. Although they are self-described as spaces for information exchange, in fact they are key forces in fabrication of audiophile fantasies centered around extraordinary esthetic experiences. In the article, I analyze examples of constructing of the desire and of the fantasies. Following Žižek, I claim that the function of the fantasy is the ordering of the social worlds. I read this literally, not as a epistemological sorting things out according to certain categories, but I view fantasy as a blueprint for heterogenic engineering (in ANT’s sense) done by an audiophile in his or her (these  are usually males) direct material environment.
The observations are grouped according to three analytical steps offered by the SCOT approach – interpretive flexibility, closure and stabilization and connection to wider context. However, while SCOT was concentrated on single technological artifacts, I suggest to focus on heterogenic assemblage operated by an audiophile.
In the end it is argued that such a mechanism of permanent and endlessly renewing fabricating of audiophile fantasies directly contributes to the circulation of consumerist capitalism.

The Repositories of the Non-knowledge. Towards a Paranoiac Hermeneutics

This paper focuses on the problem of the non-knowledge and paranoiac hermeneutics in the Internet. This is constructivist and Lacanian approach to interpreting this problem, because the interpretive communities construct knowledge and collaboratively create a small web culture with the words of final vocabulary with shared meanings. According to Umberto Eco’s theory of paranoiac interpretation and Jacques Lacan’s explanation of paranoia the result of the overinterpretation is perfect, coherent world founded on the hermetic knowledge (secret, unoffi cial or antiscience). The Internet interpretive communities prefer “to not know” (as Jacques Lacan said – ne rien vouloir savoir), refuse official, mainstream science and choose the antiscientific approach to the process of accumulating and sharing knowledge (conspiracy theories, witchcraft, alternative medicine) to explain the reality.

Hipsters as a Digital Post-community. Remarks on Post-subcultural Internet Folklore

The field of theoretical analysis presented in the paper is the hipster digital culture and its visual representations. We perceive hipsters’ digital formation as post-subculture and post-community that shapes specific cultural patterns with fragmented identity, inconstant group membership or high cultural mobility. Yet they form stabile connections with other members of post-community with strong emphasis on the common meaning of codes they use and circulate in visual communication. Moreover, we argue that hipsterism operates on two levels: (1) communicative acts of hipsters that are apparent ‘visual reflections’ of their desirable lifestyles. In other words, participants of digital post-community operate with codes created by other members, but relatively more often taken from dominant culture, and incorporated into hipster-like set of meanings; (2) hipsters and their visual representations are strongly mediatized even though there is no media mechanism of legitimization of this digital post-community, therefore the media are not able to seize a dynamic of codes’ circulation within culture.

The Terms Killers and the Definitions Seekers. Amateur Online Literary Criticism

The main theme of this paper is the problem of defining the crime fiction (detective story, hardboiled fiction, thriller) by the non-professional literary critics in the Internet interpretive communities. If the literary or film critics are also official experts and possess academic authority, based on study and experience, and their words are not merely ‘individuals’ opinions but they are supported by the institutional authority, the online critics are ‘unoffi cial experts’ (or non-specialists), and their opinions are strictly individual. Anyway they try to imitate the offi cial, institutional criticism online.

Meme Wars, Articulation, and Stuart Hall. On Structural Conditions of Popular Culture Online

Theoretically departing from Stuart Hall’s theory of articulation, the article analyzes structural conditions of popular culture online. New media are tools and spaces for people’s engagement in various interpretive communities, also consisting of services off ered by neoliberal market agents. The article deconstructs the status of these so-called “internets” being both: pop-cultural and civic resource. Popular culture online is nowadays entangled in a curious dialectics between more active communities of its audiences-participants and increasingly powerful digital culture industry. It is also a sphere of processes of articulation understood after Stuart Hall as expressing particular discursive positions (alternative to the official criteria of interpreting the reality), and as connection – here of spheres of people’s meaningful practices and (naturalized) sphere of the market.

From Strangles to Energetic Vampires. Folklore as a System of Interpretative Practices

In this paper I analyse and compare two kind of materials: ethnographic data from 19th and 20th century which indicate how people in traditional cultures recognised and understood vampires, and contemporary video materials and internet discussions about so called energy/psychic vampires. I claim that on the one hand the ideas of vampires and energy vampires differ and are based on unlike beliefs, but on the other hand they perform the same social function. We can comprehend both former and contemporary narratives about vampires/energy vampires as a form of folklore, which provides people a kind of common knowledge, especially guides and hints, how to interpret social behaviour of other people and how to “properly” react to them.

Czy w Internecie wszystko staje się lepsze po dodaniu kota? (Michalina Rutka, Miau.pl czyli wychowanie na uboczu kultury)

Myśleć czy walczyć obrazem? Na marginesie książki Urszuli Tes (Urszula Tes, Człowiek, zbiorowość, pamięć w filmach dokumentalnych Ireny Kamieńskiej)

Raport z biotechnologicznej wyspy (Piotr Zawojski, Technokultura i jej manifestacje artystyczne. Medialny świat hybryd i hybrydyzacji)

Garam masala, czyli kultura Indii między Wschodem a Zachodem (Od Ramajany do Slumdoga. Filmowe adaptacje literatury indyjskiej, red. Grażyna Stachówna, Tatiana Szurlej)