This prompted me to pay a bit more attention to some of the things going on around me that I usually ignore. It also gave me quite a few story ideas.

Now there are obvious subcultures that are race specific, but I was wondering about other subcultures that are more item based, or status based. Since subcultures exist, and will continue to pop up and fade away, I started thinking about how useful they could be in the background of a story world.

But it got me wondering -- do stores get to interview their Salvation Army bell-ringers? What sort of things do those people do when they're not ringing bells? Does someone get to fire the grumpy bell-ringers?

Anyways there are plenty of sub cultures. The whole entire world is divided into subcultures.

You got TV watching wierdos
All the different Religions such as christianity and its divisions, Judaism, Muslim, And all the rest. (to lazy to write the rest) You got Punk rockers, Skateboarders, Computer geeks, Hells angels, Coffe shop regulars, Bar junkies, Drug addicts and there are different types, Card players, Martial artists, Hippies, Pop culture people, Muscicians, Pro life militants, Collecting hobbiests(stamps, cards, etc), Golf players (eww), socialists, etc, etc, etc.

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Or you can make up your own subculture like they did in fight club. Its an open market out there for sub cultures! Creating your own is the best way so you won't make some fanatical psycho angry at you. Jump start your creative juices. take an item, sport, beleif, ways of life, put a bunch of people around the idea and create thier beleifs around thier way of life. Simple!

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His excuse--I'm not like that I just dress that way---PLEASE! I see nothing attractive about that sub set at all--he talks about being an architect and he is smart enough to be a good one 130 + IQ and now this--grrrrr That sub set could go away. But it would make a good story.

As for other item-based subcultures, I don't know if this will count, but...I grew up in rural areas of New York and Pennsylvania. I moved away for a while, and whenever I came back to visit, what struck me as being really odd (but didn't seem so when I was younger) was that every deer season, some hunters would string up on their *front* porches the buck they shot. (And the colder the weather, the better, because then the animal could hang there for a longer time.) It was quite the trophy piece to have the buck hanging near the front door - and the local tavern would let patrons string up several on *their* front porch. (I remember half-a-dozen hanging for a good two days one frigid winter, and of course, people would "take a drive" to see who got what.) Plus, the opening day of buck season is like a national holiday - no school, whether a child hunts or not, and restaurants open waay early, with all the booths - yes, booths only in some of them - filled.

And some subcultures have even smaller subcultures within them. Science fiction fandom is a subculture within which are other subcultures based on STAR TREK (and it has a Klingon subculture, to name just one), on STAR WARS, on LORD OF THE RINGS, on Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series (which has a Free Amazon subculture), on Anne McCaffrey's Pern series, and so on and so forth.

There are paramilitary subcultures, various sports fan subcultures, various kinds of model-building subcultures, history reinactment subcultures, musical instrument subcultures, you name it.

I'd be willing to bet that you'd be hard pressed to make up a subculture that isn't already in existence.

In point of fact, what LDS is talking about is almost the opposite of subculture. Subcultures are identifiable demographic units, whereas the sort of behaviors that LDS seems to be interested in cut across demographics. I think that is probably the most interesting thing about a genuine...whatever you call it, that rather than bringing together a group of people with essentially similar views and often very similar social backgrounds, it appeals to a small minorty that cuts across all other social lines. We call these activities 'orthagonal factors' because they are unlike most other social factors which tend to be predicted by only a few dominant criteria.

Many SF fandoms exhibit this tendency, being comprised of a small minority of every conventional demographic group. It used to be quite common for some hobbies to work the same way...I'm not sure that would hold true in today's world. But I think that it actually should, because of another aspect of genuine self-selecting groups that LDS missed.

It is not the case that these groups, "will continue to pop up and fade away," in fact the truth is quite different. It is the larger culture that is transitory. Groups based on self-selecting orthagonal behavior have an existance that is independent of the larger social factors that govern non-orthagonal social behavior. There will always be people that trick out their vehicles, and there always have been such people. While the behavior may be more common at some times than at others, it will always exist because some humans like to trick out their rides, and at a fundamental level this behavior is independent, it is not an artifact of social training (which is why it ends up as an orthagonal factor). Genuine self-selecting groups are not centered on activities that are undertaken for the sake of belonging to the group, so the group can never stop anyone from joining.

In this sense, all 'trends' are non-orthagonal, the individuals bid to be a member of the culture-selected group, the group is not composed of individuals that want to do the activity itself, it is composed of those that want to belong to the group.

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I don't know if this is helpful, it probably isn't. But actual subcultures are very boring, they're so utterly predictable and uncreative. It is the activity that humans indulge in despite the cultural milieu that is interesting.

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Yes, it is. I don't remember ever hearing the term 'orthagonal factors', but if your explination is correct then that is what I am interested in. And I agree, they never go away. since I am planning a story on someone 'tricking' out thier ride, far in the future and on another plannet.

The whole concept of various social classes mixing based on a modified car interesting.

Even after talking to the white-haired old men who said they drove Jeeps in one war or another, I couldn't find where the Jeep Cult held their secret meetings.

The Jeep mysteriously broke down soon after. I tried to get it fixed, but no mechanic would work on it. Eventually I sold it for a few hundred dollars.

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"Beware of vehicular secret societies."

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They do exist. For jeep? Well, I have yet to see a group of people with jeeps hanging out in parking lots, not that it couldn't happen, but I doubt it. I've seen the rich kids in high school who all had the expensive sports (muscle) cars. I think they stuck together more for status reason than anything else.

Programming tends to stretch some barriers of status and race, but not to the degree of others. I have seen programmers overlook religion and polotics on occasion in favor of thier code. Usually it requires a greater cause to get that type of unification.

As to the gang wanna Be's yes I am aware of where it started ---my teen was arrested for having a switch blade. He had to go to spend a day at a prison--he laughed his arse off over the comments the inmates made about his "nice slim butt." What a nightmare and all I end up doing is yelling at a foul mouthed blank wall. We have had to come down like an iron fist--tough love is not easy but I refuse to let him trash his life.

I don't know if this could be, strictly speaking, a subculture, but I have noticed within ex-pat circles there is a status assumed by those who have stayed in a foreign country longer. It is assumed by these people that living abroad longer gives one a deeper knowledge of what that experience (the experience of a foreign culture)is 'all about' and by extension, a better understanding of the world in general.

JOHN!

You might classify the cultures created by different religions as "subcultures." For example, consider the Jihad movement within Islam. What about hobby-lifestyle groups such as historical re-creation or societies that are based on an author's works-- i.e. Jane Austen or OSC ?

As for myself, I am part of what might be considered a subculture: I homeschool my children. Homeschoolers come from every walk of life, social status, and religion. However, you can get a group of homeschooling parents together, and there will be plenty for them to discuss!

I also home school--my 9 yr old daughter---though my son goes to high school. He had no interest in staying home.

Lobyists? I can see it, but I guess my dislike for the majority of them tends to bias me.

Terrorists are a group, probably a subculture, and that mentality does have many possiblities in stories.

One of my reasons for starting this thread was to get more ideas for subcultures I can transform to a future setting. My stories so far have been more character oriented and the background has not been greatly detailed. Now I am building a world set in the future. It is not gonig to be a pleasant place, being run down and somewhat poor.

Besides, it gives me a large enough background world for short stories and even novel if I want. Besides, I wanted to try building a world first then make characters that fit into that world.

Thanks for the welcome and the kudos!

Though I am not sure any of the specific subcultures I list will useful in your story, I feel compeled to relate, how in my rather personal experiences, subcultures manifest. How this might figure into writing is self evident. You may or may not find some of it useful. But first a quote from the ever well spoken Survivor:

"It is the larger culture that is transitory."

Indeed.

In fact my first reaction to the issue of subcultures, was that there is no thing as a single culture for there to be a subset of, and that you hadn't thought about it a lot, must have meant you must have had a rather sheltered life. But then I realized that it is far more likely that I am the one with the odd perspective.

Let me clarify. I was born and raised, for the most part, in a rather odd town. Perhaps because I did not live there for like 4 years - though my earliest memories of school in fact confirm my feeling of always being an outsider, which is how I was treated. So maybe I encouraged this treatment because I was used to it being that way, whichever. I think it is because of this that I more clearly saw the stratification of the people in my town.

The easiest example of this was my high school experience; where there were several different groups, and a significant few didn't cross "status boundaries." No there were purely racial/sexual subcultures, the Hispanics, and the Black women. The slightly-differentiated, In Crowd, which consisted of mostly white people (jocks), the baggy pant posse, and the few black males at the school, none of whom wore baggy pants. There were the Dirts, whose group did cross "status boundaries" as much as possible in a largely homogenous group, and whose sole defining element, besides having a specific spot under a huge cedar tree, where the grass didn't grow so well, was an attitude of 'look how crazy/wacky/unique I am.' (My brother was a dirt before he had to leave school because of a certain illness.) One of the largest and most difficult to define groups were the poster children, they took there lunch on the front lawn, and were academics and conformists, but for the biggest things separating them from the In crowd was the big old school building and an image of their placing school over being cool. Most interesting to me of all the groups, were the nerds, maybe because I almost fit in there, they were as Kathleen put it one of those "subcultures (that) have even smaller subcultures within them," in fact, in face of the timely stereotype that all the nerds were hackers in training, there was a very small subset of us ever did anything naughty, and most of us knew who they were. (He was picked up for counterfeiting in his senior year.)

I think, and forgive me for torturing a cliche, but at best, the culture of any place or time, is a layered cocktail that changes over time, and rarely a stewpot. I suppose that society as a schoolyard isn't a new concept either, but in the light of what a culture is and isn't, I think it is useful, especially as, each group meets at the edges more so than do the liquors in a layered cocktail. Inasmuch, I think the modern anthropologist's notion of culture as a shifting web is a good one.

One interesting idea, and I have heard this from a few sources, and though I don't know if there is any significant truth to it, it has some potential as an interesting literary device. Is that supposedly, a large percentage of the children of hippies become punks - I have seen some evidence for this, having had some friends that were old hippies and some that were punks. I have enjoyed pondering the whys of this correlation for a long time now.

Shawn-

I know it is none of my business, and I won't say I turned out great, but I am no criminal. I used to carry a knife to school with me every day of the first few years of High School. I was even guilty of wearing saggy pants. Though I always considered it a matter of comfort, and I usually wore a belt. Hell I even got busted under the dumbest of circumstances. Obviously I can't make comparisons, it wasn't a switchblade, and it was only the school security guard (who "had to" take my knife away until after school.) All I did was lend it to the Journalism teacher to open a bundle of papers, though somehow it still sounded pretty bad to my dad. I know very little of his situation, but perhaps there is some kind of truth to whatever his defenses are.

I do not suggest passive parenting. Being a new parent has led me to question myself long and hard on even saying anything at all about your problem - I have a sincere urge not to pry. I also hope you can remember something similar from your life when you were young, and your parents stopped you from doing something you wanted to do. But this is of course contingent on what this 'thing' is. Still though, it is admittedly hard for me to judge people from my life, I have always been a bit odd myself.

I truly wish you the best of luck.

-PE Sharp

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In fact my first reaction to the issue of subcultures, was that there is no thing as a single culture for there to be a subset of, and that you hadn't thought about it a lot, must have meant you must have had a rather sheltered life.

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I spent most of my early life trying to understand myself. I interacted with other people, but did not pay as much attention to them as I probably should have, but that was just me. As I started getting older I realized that to do well I had to start understanding people. I'm still working on it.

High school was a while ago for me, I remember the jocks; whom I ignored. And I believe there were other groups, but I can't remember much about them. I would have fit into the "Dirts" catagory with ease. My freinds were varied in age, status, and race. But thanks for the info, I'm starting to put together my world now. Some of the groups mentioned will work fairly well with a few modifications to transport it a few thousand years.

LDS you may find something useful on it.

There's a funny story about this, because one day we went on a field trip to see the Supreme Court (the school was near D.C.) and I didn't even think about my knife until I noticed all the metal detectors. I had to smuggle said symbol of adolescent high-spirits into my bag (fortunately they had provided a place to put bags and such). For some reason that incident didn't make me stop wearing the knife...actually, considering it in hindsight, there was no reason it would, eh?

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You could have them come up with derrogatory "labels" just like "roadkill" etc.. so that they would seem more like real society.

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Good point, that is worth some thought.

You know, I'm sure someone has written a story that touches on this.

I've recently become involved in playing Bridge (for a club). There's a whole set of shared information there that differentiates bridge players from non-bridge players.