The virtual tribes

The virtual tribes.

By Ro Gálvez.

Contemporary societies include individuals active in social networks as the new decisive actors for their existence. In social networks, virtual tribes are distinguished, which are important actors in mass consumption, public opinion and the generation of content in the RRSS.

Sociology and anthropology have provided different concepts to the phenomenon of the search for identities and peers, with connotations such as subculture, counterculture and urban tribes. These cultural studies have been generated from two schools in the first instance: Chicago and Birmingham, and on the other, from French sociology and Iberian and Mexican anthropology.

Chicago School.

Since the beginning of the First World War, the city of Chicago in the United States, had a high population growth, due to the strong immigration of European citizens and from other American cities immersed in poverty and misery. In this context, sociologists from the American Chicago School carry out ethnographic studies on different topics that were generated in immigrant neighborhoods. The Chicago school was the first to formalize sociological studies, sowing a view of not doing social science from the outside of the actors, but an independent view of the actors, this view sees them as plural and / or collective actors.

Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies.

In Birmingham through Marxist theory, cultural studies in England are developed by sociologists Dick hedbige and the English Stuart Hall, with his book Resistence Thrught rituals, showed the emergence of manifestations of the new postwar generations. The main axes that Hall (2005) postulates to study these manifestations are Marxist concepts such as hegemony, ideology, class and domination. From which he concludes that the subculture is an opposition to the working class.

A conclusion derived from the analysis of the Marxist position of subculture is to see it as a group of young people who appropriate objects from the market (teenage consumer), where it expropriates and incorporates what they produce, which unifies them as a product of the mass media. Hall (2005) calls this a dialectical relationship between the young and the market industry.

In the 60s, as a legacy of the hippie movement, the concept of counterculture emerged. Some authors (Bennett, 2001; Clark, 1976) have considered that counterculture is a key concept to understand a generation of the 60s, with a discontent towards the parental figure of society, and the dominant and reproductive systems such as : family, school, media and marriage.

The concept of the Urban Tribe is found in academic literature through Maffesoli (2004) with his book, The time of the tribes, where he talks about the existence of new youth groups that gather around nomadism and a sense of belonging. For the author, nomadism is the “possibility of revolt, it is to get out of oneself, to put accents on playful aspects, on festive aspects, on a latent hedonism, an exacerbated corporeism” (Maffesoli, 2004b, 37), while the sense of belonging it is “self-awareness, no more the closed and self-enclosed identity, sexually, ideologically and professionally (Maffesoli, 2004: 38).

Maffesoli, believes that the atomization of our society into communities highlights a new way of living together. The author used the word Tribe as a provocation, since he suggested that he was returning to something of the past. When speaking of tribe, ethnologists refer to the way in which subjects protected themselves in the jungle from adversity, whatever it may be. Today, these stone jungles are the great contemporary cities in which communities appear that simply share the same tastes.

We subjects are social beings who depend on the structures, norms and behaviors involved in living with other people. However, the individualization to which the world of consumption has led us, and the way in which people or groups have their idea of ​​constructing their social and cultural reality, raises other types of reflections on the way in which the individual assumes their role in society, the way in which they establish their identity and group membership characteristics in social networks. This is how Berger and Luckman mention it in the book “The social construction of reality”.

“The world of everyday life is not only taken for granted as reality by ordinary members of society in subjectively meaningful behavior in their lives. It is a world that originates in your thoughts and actions, and is sustained as real by them. (Berger, Luckman, 2005, p.35)

The virtual tribes.

Since 1985 the internet was already an established technology, although known to some. Author William Gibson made a revelation: the term cyberspace. In 1997 SixDegrees was created, the first site in the history of social networks, sites that are still online today. This site focuses on the fact that any person only focuses on only six steps, social circles, from the person most distant from them and that we are always all connected. Historically, it has been considered that this website failed commercially in its first launch, it laid the foundations of what we know today as social networks.

In 2003 the blogger emerged, which could only be connected with profiles of 4 degrees (friends of friends of friends). Then the social networks myspace, facebook, youtube, twitter, linkedln and many are the most popular to this day.

The difference of these postmodern tribes resides in the synergy that is generated between the archaic and the technology. Currently, 70% of internet traffic corresponds to community, erotic, philosophical or religious encounters. Postmodernity is characterized by associating opposites. On one extreme, the corporal, the desire to enjoy life, hedonism, and on the other, the spiritual, as manifested by the appearance of contemporary New Age, Mindfulness, Hinduism or yoga.

In today's society, we are building a different way of living together. Therefore, a new way of socializing and creating a community is generated, these are virtual tribes. That are generated through ideas, tastes, hobbies, or worldviews of people who connect, create spaces for dissemination and can often be marketed through it as well.

Among the virtual tribes that can be distinguished within social networks are: political tribes political ideologies (right, center, left), religious (traditional religions, new age hippies), nutritional identities (vegan, pescetarian, flexetarian etc.), sexual (LGTBIQ +), feminists (from the "rad", liberals, intersectional), image (body positive, body neutrality.), Gamers (addicted to video games), foodies (food lovers), Appearance (fashionistas), animalists (doglover, catlovers). Etc.

These virtual tribes have gained adherents with the mass use of the social network Instagram, currently it is one of the most popular social networks in which approximately 95 million photos are uploaded every day. The hashtags, is the way to be able to categorize the photo that is published, consequently through these hashtags new virtual tribes can be grouped or generated.

Do you feel identified with a virtual tribe? Leave me your comment.