Emo online

This article examines Australian emo subcultural practices and new media technologies. I use subcultural studies to analyse whether emo is, indeed, a subculture. I respond to framings of emo as an ‘Other’ (sub)culture, in mainstream Australian media and Australian alternative music scenes. I interrogate whether, as dominant media claims, emo subculturalists’ internet usage inevitably leads to ‘social alienation’. First, I present a case study of a mediatized moral panic concerning the so called ‘emo suicides’ of Jodie Gater and Stephanie Gestier in 2007. Media reports positioned emo adherents as non-normative ‘dark’ users of new technologies, particularly the internet. I counter this representation with a textual analysis of emo micro media, in the form of MySpace homepages, which demonstrate emo sociality online. However, in my final section I look at how such sociality is limited by gate-keeping practices mobilizing discourses of subcultural capital

Alienation · Criminology · Cyberculture · Mainstream · Media studies · Moral panic · New media · Normative · Political science · Politics · Popular culture · Representation (politics · Social media · Sociality · Sociology · Subculture (biology · The Internet · Crime, Deviance, and Social Control · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Law