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This cultural history reveals how cats became the undisputed mascot of the internet—"an essential look at life online" (Ryan Milner, author of The World Made Meme). Journalists and their readers seem to need no explanation for the line, "The internet is made of cats." Everyone understands the joke, but few know how it started. A Unified Theory of Cats on the Internet is the first book to explore the history of how the cat became the internet's best friend. Internet cats can differ in dramatic ways, from the goth cats of Twitter to the glamourpusses of Instagram to the giddy, nonsensical silliness of Nyan Cat. But they all share common traits and values. Bringing together fun anecdotes, tho...
Although definition can vary, to be a Furry, a person identifies with an animal as part of their personality; this can be on a mystical/religious level or a psychological level. In modern Western society having a spirit animal or animal identity can sometimes be framed as social deviance rather than religious or totemic diversity. Jessica Ruth Austin investigates how Furries use the online space to create a 'Furry identity'. She argues that for highly identified Furries, posthumanism is an appropriate framework to use. For less identified Furries, who are more akin to fans, fan studies literature is used to conceptualise their identity construction. This book argues that the Furries are not a homogenous group and with varying levels of identification within the fandom, so shows that negative media representations of the Furry Fandom have wrongly pathologized the Furries as deviants as opposed to fans.
The internet brings new urgency to the study of folklore. The digital networks we use every day amplify the capacity of legends to spread swiftly, define threats, and inform action. Using the case of a particularly popular digital bogeyman known as the Slender Man, Andrew Peck brings the study of legends into the twenty-first century. Peck explains not only how legends circulate in the digital swirl of the internet but also how the internet affects how legends seep into our offline lives and into the mass media we consume. What happens, he asks, when legends go online? How does the internet enable the creation of new legends? How do these ideas go viral? How do tradition and technology inter...
Feminism as a method, a movement, a critique, and an identity has been the subject of debates, contestations and revisions in recent years, yet contemporary global developments and political upheavals have again refocused feminism’s collective force. What is feminism now? How do scholars and activists employ contemporary feminism? What feminist traditions endure? Which are no longer relevant in addressing contemporary global conditions? In this interdisciplinary collection, scholars reflect on how contemporary feminism has shaped their thinking and their field as they interrogate its uses, limits, and reinventions. Organized as a set of questions over definition, everyday life, critical in...
This two-volume set examines recent presidential and vice presidential debates, addresses how citizens make sense of these events in new media, and considers whether the evolution of these forms of consumption is healthy for future presidential campaigns—and for democracy. The presidential debates of 2016 underscored how television highlights candidates' and campaigns' messages, which provide fodder for citizens' widespread use of new media to "talk back" to campaigns and other citizens. Social media will continue to affect the way that campaign events like presidential debates are consumed by audiences and how they shape campaign outcomes. This two-volume study is one of the first to exam...
In this incisive and timely work, Adrienne L. Massanari discusses how culture is created and challenged on Reddit.com, the self-proclaimed «front page of the internet». Massanari's ethnographic work provides a detailed examination of the contradictions that shape Reddit's culture and how they reflect its role as an epicenter of geek culture.
How play and gaming culture have mainstreamed far right ideology through social media platforms. From #Gamergate to the ongoing Big Lie, the far right has gone mainstream. In Gaming Democracy, Adrienne Massanari tracks the flames of toxicity found in the far right and “alt-right” movements as they increasingly take up oxygen in American and global society. In this pathbreaking contribution to the fields of internet studies, game studies, and gender studies, Massanari argues that Silicon Valley’s emphasis on meritocracy and free speech absolutism has driven this rightward slide. These ideologies have been coded into social media spaces that implicitly silence marginalized communities an...
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This Open Access book provides a comprehensive review of the rapidly developing esport phenomenon by examining one of its contemporary flagship titles, Overwatch (Blizzard Entertainment 2016), through three central themes and from a rich variety of research methods and perspectives. As a game with more than 40 million individual players, an annual international World Cup, and a franchised professional league with teams from Canada, China, Europe, South Korea, and the US, Overwatch provides a multifaceted perspective to the cultural, social, and economic topics associated with the development of esports, which has begun to attract attention from both commercial and academic audiences. The boo...