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The viral Twitter hashtags #DistractinglySexy, #StayMadAbby and #BeckyWithTheBadGrades produce micro-counternarratives to stereotyped characterizations of women in science and race-based affirmative action in admissions, respectively. They exemplify an emerging mode of online resistance by marginalized subjects: using social media platforms to gain wide visibility, creating hashtags for grass-roots collective participation, and viral spread of content, and using humour to destabilize the institutional framing of these conflicts by dominant groups.

Shared with permission of publisher. Published by Routledge in The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities on February 08, 2018, available online: http://www.routledge.com/9781317549093

Personal mommy bloggers create deliberately small-scale, emotionally reciprocal intimate publics through their authoring and commenting practices. This paper employs literary close reading of two individual personal mommy blogging posts, and the comments generated in response to these posts, to demonstrate the compositional strategies by which both bloggers and commenters mitigate the potential conflict arising from the articulation of controversial or taboo ideas and feelings. Members of these publics employ deliberate social strategies to achieve a balance between perfectly honest self-expression and the need for compromise and moderation of views required for fruitful social interaction and the maintenance or extension of relationships. Using phatic statements of general well-wishing, diversion or deflection, humour, and reciprocal emotional disclosure, the bloggers and commenters examined here put into practice the ideals of community, self-expression, and support earlier research has demonstrated the...

Personal mommy blogging forcefully enacts a productive tension linking the story of the self to broader public discourses. Mommy bloggers seem to understand their texts as at once public and private, in ways that are for the most part enabling rather than paralyzing or paradoxical. Based on an anonymous online survey I conducted of mommy bloggers, I conclude that they deliberately court and manage “intimate publics” that nurture a community of shared practice around the emotional, physical, and intellectual labor of parenting.

Tom Hanks et Meg Ryan interprètent deux propriétaires de librairies rivales de l’Upper West Side de New York dans You’ve Got Mail (1998), la comédie romantique de l’ère Internet de Nora Ephron. Les opposants ne réalisent pas qu’ils sont aussi des amis virtuels, aussi chers qu’anonymes, échangeant des confidences de plus en plus intimes et qu’ils sont destinés, par les conventions narratives de la comédie romantique, à consommer leur romance dans la vie réelle tout comme dans la vie branchée avant la fin de la dernière bobine du film. Cet article questionne la façon avec laquelle ce qui n’est d’abord qu’un terne conflit économique peut se transformer en un récit de comédie romantique à succès, proposant que ni une nostalgie toute de rose teintée (pour le film de l’âge d’or hollywoodien dont il est une nouvelle version), ni un futurisme techno-déterministe (mis en évidence par la place qu’occupe le dispositif de messagerie électronique) ne peuvent en rendre compte. Plutôt, le film d’Ephron déploie ultimement aussi bien le futurisme que la nostalgie, de façon sélective, pour rendre le cadre narratif plus actuel, et donc plus acceptable pour l’audience, et faire une intrigue romantique plus plausible.

John Perry Barlow's 'Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace' narrates a world in which revolutionary politics are assumed to be immanent in the machines that structure and enable networked communication. Attention to the rhetorical strategies of the piece reveals a wealth of contradictions and misdirection: newness is rooted in history; revolution is effected by commercial transaction; and liberal democracy becomes libertarianism. The ways in which the Declaration establishes and resolves narrative conflict promote an 'impossible future' that is blind both to the history of the underlying technologies and to the American revolutionary politics on which it claims to base itself. Barlow's project would have been served better by a more pragmatic intervention into real-world processes.Ten years after its original publication, the Declaration is both widely reprinted and increasingly mocked: its language has become commonplace and its idealism has come to seem absurd.

CHECK THE WEBSITE, tell yourself you're looking for someone else or you're looking as a joke. Find yourself. Experience a moment of heart stopping anxiety as you click the link on your name: "self-obsessed" "great clothes" "boring class" "who gives a f*?" "stupidest waste of time" "stuck-up snob teaching useless crap" "who cares" "don't take this class!!!" There might be positive things written about you--but this isn't going to be what you remember. It's the nasty stuff that sticks. How do you feel? A hole in the pit of your stomach ... didn't you not publish anything at all this year because you've been slaving away at the prep for this course? Didn't you assign long-format writing to give students a chance to really stretch ... and thus stretch out your marking? Didn't you paste on that smile every day knowing you were walking into a hostile room of non-majors who would rather just text-message smileys to each other than learn business writing? Why the hell are you doing this anyways? Why don't I come right out and say it: my ranking on RateMyProfessors is awful. Really bad. I've earned one of those little grey faces and an overall ranking (as of today) of 2.4, and a hotness quotient of zero, based on evaluations submitted by twenty-four students, mostly between September and March 2006. On the rating of professors The site's creators tout RateMyProfessors as a tool of student empowerment, helping undergraduates to better navigate undergraduate course selection ("About us"). But does it actually help anyone to choose their courses? I asked my current students about this in class. When queried directly about RMP, most look vaguely appalled that I know about it or that I might think that they use it to pick courses. After this discussion, in the relative privacy of my office hour, some of my students stop by to tell me with nervous sympathy that my ranking on that site "is pretty bad" and that I probably shouldn't look at it. I'm touched, if a little uncomfortable, with these students' concerns with my self-esteem, but a little self-searching suggests that they were not too far off the mark in reading my response to the site as primarily emotional. I'm surprised to discover that some--most--of my reactions to my rankings are completely personal rather than professional. Such reactions, though, are coded into RMP itself, even as it claims the moral high ground of promoting transparency in education. In nearly the same breath as RMP founder John Swapceinski claims that "millions of students use the site to help plan their class schedules, and improve the quality of their educations," the press release in which he makes this statement describes the student submissions as constituting "a public review (and sometimes a public flogging) of university professors" and promotes the feature that allows students to "see who the hottest professors are at their school, as well as read the top 15 funniest ratings" (RMP "About us"). Ultimately, I find that these reviews--unsystematic, impossible to verify for authenticity, taken not at all seriously by university administrations, and often treated as a joke by students themselves (Westhues, Romanowska)--provoke such anger and anxiety in me because ... they hurt my feelings. While on some level, the creators and raters on this site may indeed be attempting to redress the opacity of teacher evaluation and honestly spotlight truly great or poor teachers, at base RMP is most successful as an entertainment: a place to rant, to fantasize, to pass the time, to let fly the resentment and tension that build in the course of a difficult and challenging education. That this process now happens online in a publicly accessible forum in which the targets of such venting can "eavesdrop" is the only major innovation in an otherwise time-honoured tradition of gossiping about the larger-than-life figures that seem to control student destiny: professors. …