The Banana Peel Project

Yesterday I vaguely described the sense in which I believed that hacker subculture, scientific subculture, and video game subculture could be similarly conceptualized.  Today I found myself wondering exactly what it was about these examples that make them different from every other culture that relies on tools.

Take, for example, trucker subculture.  There are certainly languages, rules, and social forms that belong to that group of people whose work and lives center on trucks, transportation laws, and highway infrastructure.  But I would not classify trucker culture as technoculture.  Why?

What separates trucker subculture from, say, race car driver subculture is that truckers merely operate machines.  Race car drivers, video gamers, open source community members, hackers, and physicists also play a major role in tweaking their machines.  In other words, technoculture is about user-developers while other tool-centered subcultures are about users.

I think there is a huge difference between merely using a tool and playing an active role in its development, a difference that can at least partly be conceptualized as feedback.

So, my preliminary conceptual framework for the role of tools and culture is: While all subcultures engage with tools on some level, only some subcultures actively and self-consciously adapt them.

See how that flies.