Digital Countercultures and the Struggle for Community

Whether by accidental keystroke or deliberate tinkering, technology is often used in ways that are unintended and unimagined by its designers and inventors. In this book, Jessa Lingel offers an account of digital technology use that looks beyond Silicon Valley and college dropouts-turned-entrepreneurs. Instead, Lingel tells stories from the margins of countercultural communities that have made the Internet meet their needs, subverting established norms of how digital technologies should be used. Lingel presents three case studies that contrast the imagined uses of the web to its lived and often messy practicalities. She examines a social media platform (developed long before Facebook) for body modification enthusiasts, with early web experiments in blogging, community, wikis, online dating, and podcasts; a network of communication technologies (both analog and digital) developed by a local community of punk rockers to manage information about underground shows; and the use of Facebook and Instagram for both promotional and community purposes by Brooklyn drag queens. Drawing on years of fieldwork, Lingel explores issues of alterity and community, inclusivity and exclusivity, secrecy and surveillance, and anonymity and self-promotion. By examining online life in terms of countercultural communities, Lingel argues that looking at outsider experiences helps us to imagine new uses and possibilities for the tools and platforms we use in everyday life.

Successful Internet Entrepreneurs Don't Have To Be College Dropouts

Some of today's most successful Internet entrepreneurs didn't graduate from college. Many young people today followed the same path to pursue their dreams however ended up failing, not a surprise because 80% of the startups fail in first 5 years. As technology innovation and market competition on Internet continue to accelerate, college students need guidance and support more urgently now than ever before. Meanwhile most entrepreneurship programs offered in colleges and universities provide only general strategy-innovation-finance guidance for broad entrepreneurship while lack concentration on online startups or connection to Internet technology. We proposed a technology-business-environment model that could help guide universities in nurturing, building, and shaping their students' dreams and goals towards creating a successful Internet startup business. Finally, we demonstrated a course outline for an Internet entrepreneurship course designed for undergraduate students. Such course can be used as a core course in an entrepreneurship program or an elective course in Information Systems (IS), other sub-disciplines of computing programs, or business programs.

Successful Internet Entrepreneurs Don't Have To Be College Dropouts

Some of today's most successful Internet entrepreneurs didn't graduate from college. Many young people today followed the same path to pursue their dreams however ended up failing, not a surprise because 80% of the startups fail in first 5 years. As technology innovation and market competition on Internet continue to accelerate, college students need guidance and support more urgently now than ever before. Meanwhile most entrepreneurship programs offered in colleges and universities provide only general strategy-innovation-finance guidance for broad entrepreneurship while lack concentration on online startups or connection to Internet technology. We proposed a technology-business-environment model that could help guide universities in nurturing, building, and shaping their students' dreams and goals towards creating a successful Internet startup business. Finally, we demonstrated a course outline for an Internet entrepreneurship course designed for undergraduate students. Such course can be used as a core course in an entrepreneurship program or an elective course in Information Systems (IS), other sub-disciplines of computing programs, or business programs.