Modern Geekdom
I am a geek and have been for a long time, so I grew up with the internet and experienced certain things that people will never be able to experience again. In this paper I will discuss how our theorists, mainly Webber, Castells and Wirth would interpret the LAN party as a social institution. A LAN (Local Area Network – physical cables connecting computers in a small area) party is a gathering of people that bring their computers to a central location in order to play video games together. Because the internet has allowed relationships to develop without physical contact (multiplayer video games on the internet) a unique situation arises from applying these theorists to essentially the opposite process of interpersonal communication. Pre-internet communication involved knowing someone in person, physically and then writing letters or phoning (pen pals being an exception?). With the rise of the internet, I was able to form friendships with people in my physical community that I had never met in real life and was then able to meet many of them in real life. As an aside, just because it came up so much in determining locations of LAN parties, I will talk about perceptions of safety in the Twin Cities area and how the suburbanites never ever wanted to come anywhere close to the inner city for a LAN party. One quote from that era, about 6-7 years ago from a 17 year old attending a house party LAN we were throwing: “I am in downtown right now, not sure if you want to risk heading over.” This was at 39th and Pleasant in south Minneapolis, a great neighborhood.
As a requisite of this relationship formation, there needs to be access to the internet and this access is always limited in some physical way. Also, economics come into play, creating a tiered system of access based on quality. Because of this I will be applying Marx to a discussion of the ability to form these unique relationships based on economics in addition to discussing Webber’s ideas about information access and how they apply to contemporary physical internet access methods.
Picture of a LAN party, none of ours were ever this big:
Comments
This is such a cool idea for a paper. As an internet computer gamer (despite my statement said as a Bohemian), there really is a whole new social world. As far as making friends on the internet (who I've never and probably never will meet in person), I feel it has it's positive aspects. Because the fact that you'll never meet the person, honesty is super high. Gotta love the honesty
Posted by: Dave C. | March 30, 2007 11:36 PM
This sounds likek an interesting paper. It might be relevent to consider the kinds of groups that take place on My Space, Friendster, Facebook etc. and investigate the 'digital' and perhpas false identities that people create for themselves and how this affects social groups and relations in the digital and the real world. However this might be a bit to existential to include in a sociological study. Here is a funny little exerpt from the Findings section of this months Harper's: "Researchers found that excessive use of computers and other techological devices can cause people to suffer a loss of I.Q. more than twice that observed in marijuana users."
Posted by: Jonathan Little | March 31, 2007 05:25 AM
Since I spend an inordinate amount of time in front of this infernal machine it probably a very good thing that I don't also smoke the evil marijuana *cough* *cough* dude wait wha? They don't mention what kind of an IQ drop was observed, do they? Because if I was starting, for instance, at 160, would it drop all the way down to 130? That would be unbearable.
Posted by: dave hauser | March 31, 2007 01:18 PM
Hey, this sounds like a great idea. Glad to see you've narrowed down your topic choice to something managable. The internet is rich for analysis as an alternate community, and the aspects of tiered connectivity and suburbanites fretting the "big bad city" are very interesting. Your application of Marx will work well, but perhaps throwing some Jackson in there too might help, he might have to say something about how these LAN parties are creating an institution based soley around the computer.
Posted by: Tim Turi | April 1, 2007 01:40 PM
WTH? that's one crazy lan party.
Posted by: kat | April 2, 2007 05:40 PM