Digital Leisure and Communicative Leisure

Abstract

It is easy to turn to the Net to find out what it means to be alternative, to be a goth or a punk or a metaller. One can find Wikipedia and other forms of wiki pages discussing the history, the music and the fashions, along with hundreds, if not thousands, of pages set up by people to try to define this alternative subculture as they understand it. There is no official definition of alternative subcultures, of course. There is no International Guild of Goths, which sets out the parameters of gothness in some fine-detailed treaty. There is no rule book on how to be a punk, with specially trained punk police monitoring public spaces and arresting people who break the rules.