Microculture refers to the specialised subgroups, marked with their own languages, ethos and rule expectations, that permeate differentiated industrial societies.[1]
A microculture depends on the smallest units of organization – dyads, groups, or local communities – as opposed to the broader subcultures of race or class, and the wider national/global culture, compared to which they tend also to be more short-lived, as well as voluntarily chosen.[2] The study of kinesics – the nonverbal behavior of the small gathering – can be used to illuminate the dynamics of a given microculture.[3]
Georg Simmel drew a distinction between the universalist claims of ethics, and the more particularist concept of honour, which he considered linked to the specific social subworld – business or profession – in which it was rooted.[4] His study of secrecy also looked at the micro-secret as an aspect of meaning-control within the individual microculture.[5]
A microculture works in the same way as a microclimate, which refers to a local set of atmospheric conditions that are different from the climate of surrounding areas.[6] In this analogy, culture is likened to climate where the latter contains many microclimates within it while the former contains multiple, smaller, and more specific microcultures.[7] A microculture – whether formed by a racetrack, a university, a holiday camp or a pub – can be seen as having its own social micro-climate, with values and norms of behaviour of its own, to an extent differing from those of the general culture.[8] Such micro-climates are situational, specific to their own circumstances.[9] For instance, although a pub is considered part of the English culture, it also contains its own microculture wherein one can find a structured and temporary relaxation of social norms.[10] The same is true in the case of a racetrack where spectators from all social classes converge amid a relaxation of the constraints of respectability.[11] Kate Fox considered that "the social micro-climate of the racecourse is characterized by a unique combination of disinhibition and exceptional good manners".[12]
Arguably the wider range of choices offered by the new mass media are increasingly allowing individuals to cohere within their own microcultures, rather than exposing themselves to the cultural mainstream.[13]
The fragmentation of postmodern consumer microstructures, with their volitional and ephemeral nature, also presents a pattern of mainstream erosion in the face of an increasing number of competing microcultures.[14]
The early years of the internet saw connectivity limited to a small number of computer-savvy Netizens with their own emerging netiquette or microculture.[15] By the late 1990s, a number of microcultures, such as Slashdot, had developed online; with the Noughties, Slashdot ethos would contribute to the new wiki culture of Wikipedia.[16]
Wikipedia would then spawn its own internal microcultures, not only between different language communities, such as English, German and Japanese, but within the same language as well: subjects, work projects, ideologies all forming nodes around which microcultures could form.[17] Such a proliferation of microcultures is typical of the internet, GNU forming a particularly fertile sources of such local communities.[18]
Social psychology field researchers are alerted to the fact that different field settings – such as hospitals, airport or cafeterias – may have their own particular micro-cultures, influencing people's actions and motivation in micro-specific ways, so that findings from any given setting should not be generalised without external checking.[19]
In the 1998 fantasy novel Night Watch, the hero's mentor, urging him not to abandon his supernatural colleagues, points out that every profession has its own microculture outside of which a certain isolation is inevitable.[20]