Niche Culture, Niche Values or 1001 words on being misunderstood

What happens when niche-culture becomes the herald for niche-values? Don’t get me wrong, in many ways niche-culture—that transformation of the ways in which popular culture disseminates amongst various peoples allowing more obscure and previously overlooked elements to be given attention—has done wonderful things and represents something great. The fact that I am no longer bound culturally to my own geographic location is the kind of freedom lovers of art in all its forms have longed for. It used to be that if you lived in a town where the DJs sucked, your cultural choices were, as it were, screwed. But the internet (amongst other innovations) allowed us—we, the viewers, observers, hearers, and patrons—to explore the oddest, weirdest stuff we wanted. And some of us do. But something else ends up happening.
We human beings have, what I like to call, a tendency towards sedimentation. In other words, we take something that is new or odd or different and over time we transform it into something familiar, understandable, and limited. Its not that this process is good or bad either, it simply happens. What’s more is that we still think that it is innovative (and niche’s still might be but on a smaller scale) when in reality, what has happened is that rules have been established, parameters marked off, and horizons set in place. What is possible creatively, what is determined as legitimate, what determines legitimacy, all of this takes place within the rules of the niche. So there are limits to what is possible to be done in any given niche even though we don’t want to admit to those limits because, for the most part, admitting that there are limits is forbidden in a great number of (I say this with some irony) dominant niches.
What I find more interesting than the way that niche-culture has transformed popular culture is the ways in which it has transformed our social spaces. We have become participants in a multitude of different conversations each with their own rules. Its not that we weren’t participating in conversations before—no, it’s that the number of conversations has grown exponentially. Furthermore, the amount of information that is distributed amongst these conversations has become so plentiful that the overlap between conversations becomes difficult. And oftentimes, we confuse the conversations.

Confusing the conversation has less to do with confusing information, as it has to do with confusing the value of that information. As I said earlier, each niche has its own conversation rules or logic internal to it. And these conversation logics are based not entirely on reason so much as they are based on values. Specifically, each logic might be said to have a value or number of values that are esteemed more important than others. So people can be conversing with one another regarding the same information but, because of different niches or logics, they can never be talking about the same thing.

Moreover, we are able to participate in multiple conversations. This means that we can be participants in cultural niches whose values are in conflict with one another and not even realize it. It’s often an enigma as to how people can behave one way in a certain social setting and drastically different in another. One way of explaining this might be to say that they are participants in conversations that are operating under completely different sets of values. Such difference in behavior makes sense within the specific context because the logic aligned to the context demands behaviors that, from another perspective, are contradictory.
There’s a tendency amongst graduate students to feel disconnected from their peers who are not toiling away in libraries or cramped offices. You become so accustomed to specific conversation logics that you can have a hard time talking about things that you care a great deal about with people who are not within your specific niche. This happens even between people in different departments. Just ask my friend Kate how hard it is for the two of us, both graduate students in the humanities, to be on the same page about anything concerning our academic interests. It is perhaps because we are able to converse in another niche that we share that we are able to communicate.

The feeling of disconnection can take the form of feeling left behind by one’s peers or misunderstood because the niche that becomes dominant in one’s friends is not the same as that of our own. This happens to me all the time. I can devote a great deal of effort to work and thought within one specific niche but that niche is not as dominant or popular as the niche that my friends and peers participate in. This can result in a sense of pressure to adhere to the values esteemed by other niches even if such niches don’t question their own internal logic. This pressure is, I think, similarly felt by those who have graduated from college but have yet to obtain the kind of job they’d like, have yet to be in a longstanding partnership, etc.
With the loss of a central and totally dominant mainstream culture niches have emerged. The values central to these niches must be explored and examined if we are to progress towards conversations full of meaning and not as much misunderstanding. Human connection is not devalued in this niche-culture of ours so much as it is distracted and disrupted. So, where is our transvaluation of all values now? Is it turning inward into smaller and smaller niches (a la Dwight Schrute’s creation of a 2nd life inside of the actual second life)? Can we even get past the limits of our own niches and actually communicate with others? Do we even want to?
I would certainly like to move beyond the limits of my own academically inclined niche or my obscure pop-culture niche but I make no promises. I do, however, hope to participate in meaningful cross-niche conversations beyond such pressures.