"Being" a Stickist: A Phenomenological Consideration of "Dwelling" in a Virtual Music Scene Page: 91

                                
instrument's voice has remained relatively obscure. In the past, commercial culture has
made this kind of marginality difficult to surmount. Until the widespread and public use
of broadband Internet, media generally followed hegemonic currents from center-to-
periphery. The increased dialogic capacities of online exchanges, however, have caused
the dynamics of these cultural flows to pass a point of no return (McLuhan 1964, 38).
The voice of the subject has become increasingly centralized and participatory in these
interactions (Jenkins 2006, 3-4). Stickists who engage in the online scene ride the crest
of this shift by appropriating the conduits of media and migration on behalf of the
instrument's voice, bringing more perspectives and more bodies into the instrument's
horizons. As a result, the Stick world very often seems to straddle the physical and the
virtual as it expands.
The virtual Stick scene gathers around the instrument through the telepresent
linkage of human personae represented on the web. In such a virtual representation, a
stickist is situated within a layered ecosystem of resources that intersect to form
identity. When these representations connect they form an invaluable resource for
consubjective communications between the real human beings that surround the Stick.
The participants bring the locale into being, allowing the instrument to speak through its
virtual representation. Although virtuality is as inherently disembodied as more
traditional forms of media, virtual conduits are increasingly multisensory and live,
hailing "the viewer's latent understanding that the movement of any human
representation is indexical to movements and gestures of human bodies" (Hillis 2009,

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