Biographical preview

• Does she write for public audiences?
• Is this her first book?

• Significance of MIT Press

  • Different presses are known for having a strong catalogue in certain areas
  • MIT Press known for arts criticism, new media, STS
  • Trust that they've gone through some review, editing

Positive comments

• Empathetic voice
• Transparently laid out thought process and struggles
• Acknowledging the bounded nature of the timeline; so many people try to make things more important than they are; strong grasp of what trolling is not
• Outed her brother as an Internet troll in the first paragraph

• Good job not sensationalizing 4chan, matter of fact, matched own experiences, built trust in reader

  • Rapport with field, rapport with reader
• Anthro perspective: emic, etic
• Telling two parallel stories, then at the end saying they're the same
• Mix of things I was more familiar with (media studies/ecology), kinda familiar with (media industry, anthro), less familiar with (folklore, commodity fetishism)
• Engagement with history, and its own standing as a historical moment

Method

• Details about how she achieved a balance; distance
• "My trolls" and getting critique from them; want details about what they were critical of, what she changed
• Ethnography re: criminal, morally questionable behavior
• When there are flaws, are they fatal flaws?

• Symbolic demographics

  • Clever but insufficient, can unravel quickly in many ways
  • Interesting conclusions elided
  • Proximity and assumption of whiteness, not actual whiteness
  • Disclosing child trauma and then following up with "lol jk" could be covering something
  • Connection between truth and surface level
  • Whiteness and maleness can mean different things in different places
  • Action vs intent: maybe she's trying to get at the "doing" of race
  • Do non-white 4chan users assume others are white male? Or like them?
  • Does online culture coerce people into a more white male personality?
• Declaration of identity in the service of (e.g. "I'm Black and gay and I think [insert racist, homophobic opinion]")

• She doesn't define corpus

  • Close reading of text
  • Multi-sited ethnography
• Wants to sidestep psychology, but uses the term dissociation

Trolls and media industry

• Cultural digestion
• Trump feedback loop
• Hacker counterculture
• Generative
• Why compare memes and products of memes to
• Centered around spectacle