Microculture refers to the specialised subgroups, marked with their own languages,

ethos ''Ethos'' is a Greek word meaning 'character' that is used to describe the guiding beliefs or ideals that characterize a community, nation, or ideology; and the balance between caution and passion. The Greeks also used this word to refer to the ...

and rule expectations, that permeate differentiated industrial societies. A microculture depends on the smallest units of organization – dyads, groups, or local communities – as opposed to the broader

subculture A subculture is a group of people within a culture, cultural society that differentiates itself from the values of the conservative, standard or dominant culture to which it belongs, often maintaining some of its founding principles. Subcultures ...

s of race or class, and the wider national/global culture, compared to which they tend also to be more short-lived, as well as voluntarily chosen. The study of

kinesics Kinesics is the interpretation of body communication such as facial expressions and gestures, nonverbal behavior related to movement of any part of the body or the body as a whole. The equivalent popular culture term is body language, a term Ray ...

– the nonverbal behavior of the small gathering – can be used to illuminate the dynamics of a given microculture.

Precursors

Georg Simmel Georg Simmel (; ; 1 March 1858 – 26 September 1918) was a German sociologist, philosopher, and critic. Simmel was influential in the field of sociology. Simmel was one of the first generation of German sociologists: his neo-Kantian approach ...

drew a distinction between the universalist claims of ethics, and the more particularist concept of honour, which he considered linked to the specific social subworld – business or profession – in which it was rooted. His study of

secrecy Secrecy is the practice of hiding information from certain individuals or groups who do not have the "need to know", perhaps while sharing it with other individuals. That which is kept hidden is known as the secret. Secrecy is often controver ...

also looked at the micro-secret as an aspect of meaning-control within the individual microculture.

Microclimate

A microculture works in the same way as a

microclimate A microclimate (or micro-climate) is a local set of atmosphere of Earth, atmospheric conditions that differ from those in the surrounding areas, often slightly but sometimes substantially. The term may refer to areas as small as a few square m ...

, which refers to a local set of atmospheric conditions that are different from the climate of surrounding areas. In this analogy, culture is likened to climate where the latter contains many microclimates within it while the former contains multiple, smaller, and more specific microcultures. A microculture – whether formed by a racetrack, a university, a holiday camp or a pub – can be seen as having its own social micro-climate, with values and norms of behaviour of its own, to an extent differing from those of the general culture. Such micro-climates are situational, specific to their own circumstances. For instance, although a pub is considered part of the English culture, it also contains its own microculture wherein one can find a structured and temporary relaxation of social norms. The same is true in the case of a racetrack where spectators from all social classes converge amid a relaxation of the constraints of respectability. Kate Fox considered that "the social micro-climate of the racecourse is characterized by a unique combination of disinhibition and exceptional good manners".

Microculture/mainstream

Arguably the wider range of choices offered by the new mass media are increasingly allowing individuals to cohere within their own microcultures, rather than exposing themselves to the cultural mainstream. The fragmentation of

postmodern Postmodernism encompasses a variety of artistic, cultural, and philosophical movements that claim to mark a break from modernism. They have in common the conviction that it is no longer possible to rely upon previous ways of depicting the wo ...

consumer microstructures, with their volitional and ephemeral nature, also presents a pattern of mainstream erosion in the face of an increasing number of competing microcultures.

Online microcultures

The early years of the internet saw connectivity limited to a small number of computer-savvy

Netizen The term ''netizen'' is a portmanteau of the English words ''internet'' and ''citizen'', as in a "citizen of the net" or "net citizen". It describes a person actively involved in online communities or the Internet in general.

s with their own emerging

netiquette Etiquette in technology, colloquially referred to as netiquette, is a term used to refer to the unofficial code of policies that encourage good behavior on the Internet which is used to regulate respect and polite behavior on social media platforms ...

or microculture. By the late 1990s, a number of microcultures, such as

Slashdot ''Slashdot'' (sometimes abbreviated as ''/.'') is a social news website that originally billed itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters". It features news stories on science, technology, and politics that are submitted and evaluated by site ...

, had developed online; with the

Noughties File:2000s decade montage3.png, From top left, clockwise: The Twin Towers of the original World Trade Center on fire and the Statue of Liberty on the left during the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001; the euro enters into European currenc ...

, Slashdot ethos would contribute to the new wiki culture of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a free content, free Online content, online encyclopedia that is written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Founded by Jimmy Wales and La ...

would then spawn its own internal microcultures, not only between different language communities, such as English, German and Japanese, but within the same language as well: subjects, work projects, ideologies all forming nodes around which microcultures could form. Such a proliferation of microcultures is typical of the internet, GNU forming a particularly fertile sources of such local communities.

Field research

Social psychology Social psychology is the methodical study of how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. Although studying many of the same substantive topics as its counterpart in the field ...

field researchers are alerted to the fact that different field settings – such as hospitals, airport or cafeterias – may have their own particular micro-cultures, influencing people's actions and motivation in micro-specific ways, so that findings from any given setting should not be generalised without external checking.

Literary examples

In the 1998 fantasy novel '' Night Watch'', the hero's mentor, urging him not to abandon his supernatural colleagues, points out that every profession has its own microculture outside of which a certain isolation is inevitable.Sergei Lukyanenko, ''The Night Watch'' (2007) np

References

External links

The Microcultural Context
{{Culture Cultural anthropology