Subculture as learning context: subcultural music consumption as language, channel and journey

ABSTRACT

Subcultures cultivate alternative and resistive discourses and practices as well as transcendental meanings, experiences and identities. Yet, current knowledge falls short in documenting the ways in which subcultures facilitate learning. Therefore, this study empirically investigates the ways in which music subcultures offer consumers a learning context and potentially transformative process. Via an extensive online and offline ethnographic research design, the findings show how music subcultures enable learning at both the individual and collective levels. Findings reveal that the language of music awakens, the channel of music engages, and the music as journey of experiences facilitates action, navigation from one subcultural scene to another, alternative ways of knowing and critical social learning. Subcultures of music therefore provide consumers with a highly informal and unstructured experience in a participative, (inter)active, creative learning context.

KEYWORDS:

• Subculture
• music consumption
• learning
• self-transformation
• ethnography
• netnography