Fringe culture
Related: Fringecore magazine - subcultures - underground
Any cultural manifestation not in the mainstream can be said to be on the fringe. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fringe [Jul 2005]
"Ideas enter our above-ground culture through the underground. I suppose that is the kind of function that the underground plays, such as it is. That it is where the dreams of our culture can ferment and strange notions can play themselves out unrestricted. And sooner or later those ideas will percolate through into the broad mass awareness of the broad mass of the populace. Occulture, you know, that seems to be perhaps the last revolutionary bastion." - Alan Moore
The relationship between mainstream, "hegemonic" culture and the subcultures that split off from it mirrors the relationship of a linear, dominant narrative strain to the skein of other paths that could be pursued by the reader of hypertext. In other words, the way power is distributed in society relates to the way meaning is distributed in a hypertext narrative. In Subculture, The Meaning of Style, Dick Hebdige describes hegemony and the battle for subcultural meaning that resides beneath it:
"Maps of meaning [in society] are charged with a potentially explosive significance because they are traced and retraced along the lines laid down by the dominant discourses about reality, the dominant ideologies. Thus they tend to represent, in however obscure and contradictory a fashion, the interests of the dominant groups in society... --Dick Hebdige