Virtual communities and hip-hop music consumers in Singapore: interplaying global, local and subcultural identities

Abstract

Activities and pursuits in leisure worlds often occur within subcultural contexts. Subcultural studies, however, have often premised the formation and existence of subcultures on the local. Wider local cultures have often been thought to have an impact on these subcultures. Even where subcultures have been 'imported' into a particular locality from another local setting, the focus has often been on how the subculture has been 'localized' by the 'importing' locality. This study offers an alternative perspective on leisure subcultures, with reference to the advent of the Internet as a new Information and Communication Technology (ICT). The Internet will be shown here to allow subcultural identities to be made flexible, where various local subcultural identities are able to fuse into a global subcultural identity, or retain their local flavours, as the situation permits. The case study of hip-hop music consumers in Singapore and their involvement in virtual communities on the Internet will be used to show the fluidity in identity formation and maintenance brought about by this new ICT. It will be shown here that local cultures and the globalized hip-hop culture which is associated with African American culture is evoked variably according to the specifics of the interactions of these hip-hop consumers in virtual communities.