Libros

Internet trolls live to upset as many people as possible, using all the technical and psychological tools at their disposal. They gleefully whip the media into a frenzy over a fake teen drug crisis; they post offensive messages on Facebook memorial pages, traumatizing grief-stricken friends and family; they use unabashedly racist language and images. They take pleasure in ruining a complete stranger’s day and find amusement in their victim’s anguish. In short, trolling is the obstacle to a kinder, gentler Internet. To quote a famous Internet meme, trolling is why we can’t have nice things online. Or at least that’s what we have been led to believe. In this provocative book, Whitney Phillips argues that trolling, widely condemned as obscene and deviant, actually fits comfortably within the contemporary media landscape. Trolling may be obscene, but, Phillips argues, it isn’t all that deviant. Trolls’ actions are born of and fueled by culturally sanctioned impulses—which are just as damaging as the trolls’ most disruptive behaviors.

Phillips describes, for example, the relationship between trolling and sensationalist corporate media—pointing out that for trolls, exploitation is a leisure activity; for media, it’s a business strategy. She shows how trolls, “the grimacing poster children for a socially networked world,” align with social media. And she documents how trolls, in addition to parroting media tropes, also offer a grotesque pantomime of dominant cultural tropes, including gendered notions of dominance and success and an ideology of entitlement. We don’t just have a trolling problem, Phillips argues; we have a culture problem. This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things isn’t only about trolls; it’s about a culture in which trolls thrive.

Postfeminist Digital Cultures explores some of the more controversial and contested social media practices engaged in by girls and young women, including sexual self-representations on social network sites, sexting, and self-harm vlogs. Informed by feminist media and cultural studies, Dobson delves beyond alarmist accounts to ask what it is we fear about young women's self-representation in networked publics, and unpacks the complexity of digitally mediating young femininity in the postfeminist era.

This book sheds light on the growing phenomenon of cyberactivism in the Arab world, with a special focus on the Egyptian political blogosphere and its role in paving the way to democratization and socio-political change in Egypt, which culminated in Egypt's historical popular revolution on Jan. 25, 2111. The authors examine the relevance and applicability of the concepts of citizen journalism and civic engagement to the discourses and deliberations in five of the most popular political blogs in Egypt. They explore the potential connection between virtual activism and real activism in Egyptian political life, as represented in the calls for social, economic and political reform on the streets.