On Deviance
I recently wrote a paper on Internet Communities and Deviance, regarding how membership in such a community can contribute to the eventual deviance of an individual as that person gradually assimilates the values of the community; while having normally undesirable behaviors “normalized” by a supporting, deviant, community.
I’m looking forward to posting it for you, dear Internet, but given the ongoing debacle that is the debate regarding the veracity of my work, I’d rather not post it until I have the all-clear on the work for good, just in case the prof opts to run it through the internet looking for duplicates.
Regardless, I had another addendum strike me regarding the topic, something I wish I’d had a chance to add to the paper before submitting it – the norm-breaking effect of the desire for fame, and the constant push against boundaries in real culture and on the internet.
Within any community, the desire to stand out amongst the membership is a common desire, and is, by it’s own nature, achieved by exceeding or excelling in some manner when compared to the norms of the community. In time, this desire to exceed and excel leads to a gradual progress of both eventual achievement and the norms of the community. Take wealth, for instance. Initially, being a Millionaire was a spectacular thing; and our society regarded highly those who reached such a point. Over time, however, the number of millionaires grew. It normalized, to an extent, and with every new millionaire achieved, such a feat became a little less special. Then, new heights were achieved. Someone amassed a fortune of 10 million dollars. Suddenly, there was a new achievement to accord, and combined with the increasing number of single-millionaires, a new bar was set. Being a millionaire almost stopped being the goal so much as it became 1/10th of the goal; being a millionaire became mundane.
Amassing wealth, however, is hardly deviant. But the attention garnered through excesses of wealth is akin to the attention garnered through excesses of debauchery and flesh, those of deviance and sin and the unnatural. Once, see, tattoos were the provenance of sailors and natives, they were unique and unusual and worthy of attention – the tattooed man or woman was a frequent attraction at sideshows and the like. As, however, the culture and the skills spread, it took more and more tattoos, and increasing complexity of the artform in order to render the tattooed individual unusual enough to warrant attention. Piercing, too, has undergone this gradual progression towards normalization, as increasingly unusual piercings start of as unusual and exotic, then become vogue, then finally, mundane, as the body-modification tribe migrates onward to the increasingly exotic and unusual. Towards the new.
This is the nature of celebrity on the internet – it rewards the strikingly unusual, the eccentric, the deviant. Those that are more different than the others gain attention, and the rest merely become more voices shouting hollowly into the faceless mob. Those driven by a desire for fame online are driven to ever-increasing heights and depths in order to stand out from the crowd – it is only by showing exceptional talent that one may innately stand out from the mass, and those without talent but retaining the drive for fame have only one recourse remaining to them; deviance and debasement, and in order to stand out in such a path, they needs must be more debased, more deviant than those before them in order to gain the attention they desire.
When tempered by the understanding that much that is notable online is the captured representation (photos, videos, and audio) of something occurring in the real world, it immediately becomes apparent how one’s desire to stand out online can easily lead to real-life deviance; that is, one must be deviant in real life in order to have material by which they may stand out online.
The other genuine problem with the internet in this context is that the individual is not merely competing with the marginally-motivated geographical neighbours to them, but by the much more motivated and content driven internet communities; that is, to continue the body-modification theme, the level of “exceptional” when compared to an individual’s geographical neighbourhood, say their city, their town, may be minimal – a few tattoos and a couple of atypical piercings should be sufficient to stand out from the majority, after all, not the entire city is interested in body-modifcation. However, the internet is communities of like-minded people, and extended to the real world in metaphor, how well would those “few tattoos and a couple of atypical piercings” lend an individual to standing out if their entire city or town were dedicated to body-modification? Not at all, is the answer, for those few modifications become minimal, the norm, amongst such a community, and thus, membership in an online community dedicated to like interests leads to deviance simply by the nature of the standards established within the community for what is exceptional. Without the internet, “competition” of this order would not be accessible to individuals only exposed to “normal” society.
