Beyond Disruption: The Life Cycle of Pioneer Communities and Their Role in the Rise of a “Digital Society”

Abstract

In journalistic discourse, the move toward a “digital society” is often condensed into the concepts and operations of disruptive change, with burgeoning start-ups maneuvering at its epicenter. This article rejects truncated accounts of media and technological change by harnessing the story of the role played by pioneer communities in the process of society’s increasingly deep mediatization. Media-related pioneer communities, such as the Quantified Self, Maker, and Hacks/Hackers movements, are characterized by their experimental practices and their imaginaries of society’s malleability through media technologies. This article discusses the life cycle of pioneer communities, starting with their formation, when they emerged from the context of social movements and technology-related communities, through their peak phase, whereupon they emerged as start-ups (with their subsequent cultural by-products) and began to receive media attention, to their gradual demise, a stage in their development that is often accompanied by “becoming everyday” as their experimentation melts into quotidian practices. It is argued that the role pioneer communities play in the processes of deep mediatization is their ability to structure horizons by sounding out the possibility of change and by catalyzing translation processes, which means, on the one hand, the translation of ideas between different social domains and, on the other, the transmission of the purely experimental. Through this life cycle, pioneer communities are fundamental, collective actors in society’s deeply mediatized rearticulation.