<html><body><div style="color:#000; background-color:#fff; font-family:times new roman, new york, times, serif;font-size:10pt"><div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; "><span class="s1">Hi all, </span></div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; "><span class="s1"><br></span></div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; "><span class="s1">(apologies for cross-posting) </span></div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; "><span class="s1"><br></span></div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; "><span class="s1">We're in the midst of something of a "troll panic" here in Australia - Sydney's News Limited tabloid newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, has initiated a "stop the trolls" campaign in response to Twitter abuse directed at celebrities. A Rugby League footballer who was the target of abuse has secured an audience with the Prime Minister to discuss the problem, and various politicians have signed up for the
campaign. </span></div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; "><span class="s1"><br></span></div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; "><a href="http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/aussie-skipper-michael-clarke-and-nrl-star-robbie-farah-support-our-twitter-campaign-to-stopthetrolls/story-e6freuy9-1226472040240" target="_blank" title="http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/aussie-skipper-michael-clarke-and-nrl-star-robbie-farah-support-our-twitter-campaign-to-stopthetrolls/story-e6freuy9-1226472040240
Cmd+Click to follow link">http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/aussie-skipper-michael-clarke-and-nrl-star-robbie-farah-support-our-twitter-campaign-to-stopthetrolls/story-e6freuy9-1226472040240</a></div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; "><br></div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; ">I am aware of similar events in the UK in the recent past. Under the circumstances, I thought it might be a good moment to remind the list of the current call for papers for the Fibreculture Journal. </div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; "><span class="s1"><br></span></div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; "><span class="s1">The politics of trolling and the Negative Space of The Internet</span></div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; "><span class="s1"><br></span></div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; "><span class="s1">A great deal of thinking about the Internet and politics is still structured by a desire
for deliberative democracy. From 1993 - when Howard Rheingold enunciated one of the Internet’s key founding myths - the virtual community - scholars have sought and found communities characterised by a mutuality of interests, a common purpose, a collaborative striving to renovate the democratic ideal, a tendency towards the “regulative idea” of the ideal speaking position, and an acknowledgement of the obligations of citizenship within the political association. For so long the Internet has continued to function, in Barbrook’s formulation, as a “redemptive technology”. Social media is just the latest in a long line of technologies which may, on a certain vision, rescue liberal democracy, with its decaying civic life and corrupt media, from itself. </span></div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; "><span class="s1"><br></span></div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; "><span class="s1">There is, proportionally, too little
attention to the everyday conflicts that haunt all such communities. Some conflict is temporary, and can be accounted for in terms of long-standing democratic theory. But some conflict is persistent, intractable. Some of it is gratuitous, and deliberately disruptive. Online, those who bring it about are often subject to normative disapprobation. Sometimes people call them trolls.</span></div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; "><span class="s1"><br></span></div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; "><span class="s1">”Troll”, as a term of moral opprobrium, indicates an online actor who is not interested in deliberation, but in derailing it. Trolling is not apt to be captured by network maps or visualisations of online publics, because these teachniques cannot discern which nodes in a conversational network are created in bad faith, or in a spirit of disruptive play. Trolls are not interested in redeeming democracy through
deliberation, and they mock attempts to do so. Trolls respect no procedural rules, though they may be generative of them. Trolls are the constitutive outside of online communities of political discussion, they are the intolerable of the most tolerant communities. Trolls are usually someone else, defined from our own position and interests. When they are not, and we inhabit trolling, we discover that trolling requires know-how, close reading, experience, sometimes sympathy with those we would disrupt. </span></div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; "><span class="s1"><br></span></div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; "><span class="s1">What are the consequences to seeing trolling and other forms of affective behaviour as the norm, rather than the aberrant? The discourse of digital art has long since told this story, but the intellectual desire for open and constitutive democracy has overridden the 'actually existing democracy' of
bullying, trolling, threats, inane memes and low signal-to-noise ratios. What would happen if we started to think of trolling as the central practice in online discourse? What if trolling is the Internet’s signature mode of discursive politics? What if we started to think about trolling as a practice which is generative rather than destructive? </span></div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; "><span class="s1"><br></span></div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; "><span class="s1">This special issue of fibreculture seeks a range of perspectives on trolling, online conflict and incivility. Twenty years on, it looks to interrogate the founding myth of virtual community with accounts of generative conflict, strategic incivility, and productive trolling. </span></div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; "><span class="s1"><br></span></div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; "><span class="s1">We seek
papers on a range of topics not limited to</span></div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; "><span class="s1"><br></span></div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; "><span class="s1">- Trolling, activism and politics</span></div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; "><span class="s1">- The persistence and ubiquity of online conflict </span></div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; "><span class="s1">- Trolling as a business model: the mainstream media and clickbait</span></div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; "><span class="s1">- Gendered aspects of trolling and incivility</span></div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; "><span class="s1">- 4chan and trolling; activism and meme factories</span></div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; "><span class="s1">- Trolling and cyberbullying</span></div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; "><span class="s1"> - Complaints about trolling and
the “hatred of democracy” – are complaints about trolling really an attempt to re-gentrify political debate? </span></div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; "><span class="s1">- Cultures and rituals of trolling – troll culture and the celebration of lulz</span></div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; "><span class="s1">- Trolling and “cyber-bullying”</span></div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; "><span class="s1">- The Internet and agonistic politics</span></div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; "><span class="s1">- Trolling and counterpublics</span></div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; "><span class="s1">- The grammar of trolling</span></div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; "><span class="s1">- Trolling as the glitch in social network analysis and “big data”</span></div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; "><span class="s1">- Popular culture, trolls and the
democratization of politics</span></div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; "><span class="s1">- Tabloid media, professionalization of trolling and the economics of opinion</span></div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; "><span class="s1">- Trolling as cyber-bullying, internet as masochistic survivalist playground</span></div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; "><span class="s1">- The pleasures of trolling</span></div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; "><span class="s1">- Trolling the trolls</span></div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; "><span class="s1">- The art and ‘new aesthetics’ of trolling</span></div><div class="p1" style="font-family: Tahoma; "><span class="s1">- The gamification of trolling </span></div><div style="font-family: Tahoma; "><br></div><div style="font-family: Tahoma; "><div style="margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-size: 1.1em; font-family: Muli, sans-serif;
vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6em; background-color: rgb(235, 239, 242); ">Please note that for this issue, initial submissions should be <strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-size: 13px; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; ">abstracts only</strong></div><div style="margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-size: 1.1em; font-family: Muli, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6em; background-color: rgb(235, 239, 242); "><strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-size: 13px; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; ">abstract deadline: </strong>October 15, 2012 (via email, to Jason Wilson, email address below)<br><strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-size: 13px; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; ">article deadline</strong>: January 15, 2012<br><strong
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-size: 13px; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; ">publication aimed for:</strong> April/May, 2013</div><div style="margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-size: 1.1em; font-family: Muli, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6em; background-color: rgb(235, 239, 242); ">all contributors and editors must read the guidelines at;<br><a href="http://fibreculturejournal.org/policy-and-style/" data-bitly-type="bitly_hover_card" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(238, 238, 238); font-style: inherit; font-size: 13px; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(58, 105, 153); text-decoration: none; outline: none; ">http://fibreculturejournal.org/policy-and-style/</a><br>before working with the Fibreculture Journal</div><div style="margin-bottom: 1em;
padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-size: 1.1em; font-family: Muli, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6em; background-color: rgb(235, 239, 242); "><strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-size: 13px; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; ">email correspondence for this issue:</strong></div><div style="margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-size: 1.1em; font-family: Muli, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6em; background-color: rgb(235, 239, 242); "><a href="mailto:Jason.Wilson@canberra.edu.au" data-bitly-type="bitly_hover_card" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(238, 238, 238); font-style: inherit; font-size: 13px; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(58, 105, 153); text-decoration: none; outline: none; ">Jason.Wilson@canberra.edu.au</a></div><div
style="margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-size: 1.1em; font-family: Muli, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6em; background-color: rgb(235, 239, 242); "><a href="mailto:Christian.mccrea@rmit.edu.au" data-bitly-type="bitly_hover_card" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(238, 238, 238); font-style: inherit; font-size: 13px; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(58, 105, 153); text-decoration: none; outline: none; ">Christian.mccrea@rmit.edu.au</a></div><div style="margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-size: 1.1em; font-family: Muli, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6em; background-color: rgb(235, 239, 242); "><a href="mailto:Glen.fuller@canberra.edu.au" data-bitly-type="bitly_hover_card" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; border-bottom-style: solid;
border-bottom-color: rgb(238, 238, 238); font-style: inherit; font-size: 13px; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(58, 105, 153); text-decoration: none; outline: none; ">Glen.fuller@canberra.edu.au</a></div><div style="margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-size: 1.1em; font-family: Muli, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6em; background-color: rgb(235, 239, 242); "><br></div><div><div>Cheers</div><div>JW</div></div></div></div></div></body></html>