![]() ![]() ) describes in his seminal work on the “shared fantasy” of table-top role-playing gamers, social play is tantamount to gamers’ leisure activities. Shared fantasy: Role-playing games as social worlds. These works separate the individual benefits from the social benefits, overlooking symbolic interactionist insights into social life. This article is, in part, a response to previous leisure research that finds the social nature of gaming surprising and unusual. The analysis reveals how YouTube’s policies and practices as ideological choices contribute to the normalisation of racism on social media. I illustrate how neoliberal ideology is now implemented on three levels on YouTube: through creating an illusion of intimacy between a creator and his/her fans, through the promise of equal opportunity on YouTube and through a neoliberalist interpretation of the marketplace-of-ideas principle. In my analysis, I contextualise PewDiePie’s own comments and YouTube’s publications into the history of Internet culture and introduce the development of YouTube into a neoliberalist sphere. How and why the social limits of racist speech have become obscure and ‘outdated’ for a YouTube star PewDiePie and his over 100 million fans? How have the policies of YouTube affected the general understanding of the limits of racist discourse in the digital media context? In this article, I argue that the case of PewDiePie shows how YouTube exercises a neoliberalist understanding of freedom of speech. This suggests that studies of everyday discrimination and the implications of mistreatment should extend to online spaces, where racism and sexism are reproduced. Furthermore, sociologists identify identity-based harassment as a form of discrimination in other domains of social life, but present measures of discrimination do not consider the online domain. Current instruments that assess trolling behaviors and experiences do not attend to this definition of trolling as identity-based harassment, calling into question construct validity. These results suggest a disconnect between academic definitions of trolling that focus on prosocial or humor-based forms of trolling and lay definitions which foreground identity-based harassment and harm. Instead, respondents report that harassment on the basis of race and gender is indicative of trolling. Surveying 120 US-based online users, I find that the spectrum of behaviors classified in the literature as “trolling” do not resonate with respondents. The validity of survey instruments may potentially be at risk if online users and academics, who subsequently advocate for interventions, have competing understandings of trolling. ![]() Rising media and academic concerns for the social implications of online trolling require that scholars understand how everyday users conceptualize trolling. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |