Skate and create: Internet appropriations by Filipino skateboarders

• Main Author: Tintiangko, Jeremy Tan
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2017
• Subjects: Subculture; Internet; Mediation
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_masteral/5734
• Institution: De La Salle University

This study aims to contribute to the discourse of subcultural theory and media studies by shedding light on the relationship between contemporary subcultures and the Internet. With the Filipino skateboarding subculture as the case study subject, I explore the ways in which they appropriate media and how they perceive its role in their lives. The central purpose of this research is to provide a nuanced analysis on the nature of contemporary subcultures and identify possibilities for resistance in a post-authentic and increasingly-fragmented society through alternative ways of utilizing new media and technologies. First and foremost an autoethnographic study, this research deviates from the errors of convention – moving away from the tendency of subcultural theory in the past to demarcate subcultures into aggrandized characters or simulacras of resistance as a result of adopting research methods that merely analyzed subcultural phenomena from afar. Instead, this study employed a triangulation of qualitative data gathering methods which yielded rich, compelling, and insightful views from subcultural member themselves. Among the methods utilized were in-depth interviews, a focus group interview, and qualitative content analysis. As revealed by the findings, Filipino skateboarders are appropriating the Internet and various new media technologies to nurture and sustain their subculture. In the process, mediation or the subversive appropriation of new media technologies by alternative social groups to work around the fixity of traditional media technologies and institutional systems, and to negotiate, manipulate, and blur the boundaries between interpersonal interaction and mass communication (Lievrouw 4) emerges both as a concept that characterizes and a means that enables the form of resistance being carried out by Filipino skateboarders.