heathervescent: Mainstreaming a Subculture

I drive around LA, I go to the grocery store. I drive on the freeway. I go to the Korean spa and pass through various neighborhoods. I go to the club, driving down sunset on Saturday night. Everywhere I go, I see communities. Subcultures. Choices. Options. Possibilities. People can be leaders and invisible at the same time. Subcultures are everywhere. It's a matter of who you want to be. What you want to do. You can rise to the top of any of them. You can create any one of them. You can participate in many numbers of them. It depends on what you want to do. And who you are. And who you want to be.

There are communities that are mainstream. Communities many people participate in. Many people identify with. How do you create a community? How do you take a subculture mainstream? _you_ don't create a community. _you_ don't take a subculture mainstream. A community is a collective vision created by participants. When that vision is so tantalizing and appealing to many people, easy to integrate their views, fills a void/need and allows individuals to grow and stretch, is easily integrated and has a bit of momentum, that community/subculture can go mainstream.

So how do you create a collective vision? And how do you make it so tantalizing to appeal and integrate to many people? And how (and who) decides when and what is appealing. And who leads, herds, trims, guides that vision? And how does one know what to include and what to trim? What to pay attention to and what to ignore? What are the applicable trends, who are the guerrilla glue connectors and what is the explosive firestarter? I know the answers to these questions. And, I know how to do this. The question to me now, is what is worthwhile of my efforts to do so?