‘I was bored so…’: motivational accounts of participation in an online emo group

Abstract

We examine members' spontaneous accounts for joining and participating in an online emo forum. The Internet and social networking sites are central features of contemporary youth cultures; the analysis of interaction on emo forums can thus provide a way of appreciating emo as a ‘Community in Practice’. We analyse popular discussion threads collected from a key emo website, using membership categorisation and conversation analysis. In these threads, members introduce themselves and account for joining and posting pictures in response to a prior request to do so. Analysis shows that newbies establish their emo attributes and hence entitlement to participate while dismissing emo-related motivation for joining the forum, claiming instead a desire to relieve boredom. Participants similarly accounted for posting photos of themselves and for producing fan pics as due to boredom. We show how claiming to be bored allows members to engage with the group while negotiating potentially problematic inferences that attend subcultural membership. We conclude that our approach provides a useful methodology for furthering our understanding of an important aspect of contemporary youth subcultures.

Keywords:

• emo
• youth subcultures
• online interaction
• Internet
• conversation analysis
• membership categorisation analysis

Notes

1. Psytrancers are young adults who enjoy ‘psychedelic trance’ which is a form of computer-generated dance music, who visit psytrance websites and who attend psytrance events (Greener and Hollands 2006).

2. Although it was developed as an approach to naturally occurring talk, CA has been fruitfully applied to online communication (Antaki et al. 2005; Stommel 2008; Vayreda and Antaki 2009). Internet interactions can be analysed as sequentially related because participants treat them that way (Vayreda and Antaki 2009).

3. The EC website is divided into different sections such as ‘Emo Fashion’, ‘Emo Music’, etc. Each section contains links to related discussions or ‘chats’. ‘The Hangout’ section was the most active section and contained the most discussion and the most posts.

4. Skinny jeans and this brand name as well as hairstyle are mentioned on the emo website, under ‘emo fashion’.