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FCJ-164 ‘Don’t be Rude on the Road’: Cycle Blogging, Trolling and Lifestyle

By ⋅ December 30, 2013 ⋅ Post a comment

Steve Jones Nottingham Trent University Introduction In her introduction to Cyclebabble: bloggers on biking (2011: ix), the British journalist Zoe Williams argues that, whatever cyclists’ differences, ‘We revel in our differences: Lycra mankini or tweed trousers tucked into your sock? Traffic lights – a suggestion or an order? Racer or hybrid, helmet or commando, freewheel or fixie. Nothing sours the bond’. And yet the Guardian’s ‘Bike Blog’, the on-line discussion board from which the selection of posts in Cyclebabble is drawn, is partly constituted by precisely such a souring of the bond. Accusations of trolling abound, from both within and outside cycling’s various practices and subcultures. In particular, discussion is regularly prefaced or framed–as in the quote above–by a set of negative conventions (such as riding through red lights, the exemption of cycling from ‘road tax’, or the wearing of ‘inappropriate’ clothing), which are variously used to condemn all cyclists, […]

FCJ-157 Still ‘Searching for Safety Online’: collective strategies and discursive resistance to trolling and harassment in a feminist network

By ⋅ December 30, 2013 ⋅ Post a comment

Frances Shaw University of Sydney ‘Trolling in a feminist forum’ redux The issues of trolling and cyberbullying are often linked in the media (see for example Brockie, 2012, which is emblematic of these discourses). Although both harassers and trolls are present as a problem for feminist blogs, I see trolling and harassment as separate issues. I take a more ambivalent approach to trolling, not assuming that trolling is always harassing, and indeed demarcating harassment as a slightly different issue. In what follows I review both the academic literature on trolling and strategies to deal with the trolls (particularly in feminist discursive contexts), and then review discourses on trolling and moderation in my interviews with participants from Australian feminist blogging networks. My research on feminist blogs in Australia comprised interviews with 20 bloggers from around Australia between the period November 2009 and March 2010. The network that I studied was defined […]

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