Tag: harassment

  • The highly evolved, politicised, social industry-based apparatus of personal destruction

    This is a disturbing and insightful piece from Richard Seymour. Highly recommend you subscribe to his Patreon if you haven’t already. He closes with the warning that it’s only “matter of historical contingency, lets say of the vagaries of uneven and combined development, that we do not yet have such a highly evolved, politicised, social […]

  • What happens when you meet a troll?

    This is one of the most engaging things I’ve ever seen on YouTube. I’d enthusiastically watch an entire web series built around this premise. There’s a whole research agenda waiting to be undertaken exploring the troll’s claim that he needed to be abusive in order to get noticed by Owen Jones.

  • Social media as asshole amplification technology, or, the moral psychology of platform architecture

    This is Jaron Lanier’s memorable description of social media in his new book Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. Social media is a technology for asshole amplification. To be clearly seen in the fact that “since social media took off, assholes are having more of a say in the world” (pg 43). His […]

  • Online Othering: Exploring the Dark Side of the Web

    Call for Papers – Edited Collection Online Othering: Exploring the Dark Side of the Web Editors: Dr Karen Lumsden (Loughborough University) and Dr Emily Harmer (University of Liverpool) The Internet plays a vital role in many aspects of our social, political and cultural lives and in the early days of its expansion there was much […]

  • Persistance, Searchability and Incivility

    This essay on ‘the cult of cruelty’ has some interesting points to make about the role of what danah boyd calls persistence and searchability in facilitating incivility online. It makes it possible to trawl through someone’s activity, enabling a degree of engagement with choices and representations that would not otherwise be possible: I’ve been thinking […]

  • Out trolling the trolls

    I’ve just finished reading the excellent This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things by Whitney Phillips. It offers fascinating insights into the evolution of ‘trolling’ as a practice, leading from its original form of sub-cultural self-identification to the diffusion of the label across the entire spectrum of online activities deemed to be anti-social. Her […]