You can’t afford NOT to buy it
Wow, so hello everyone after literally 6 months of not saying anything because I’m coy. No, not coy. Busy. Revising a book, which if you feel so inclined could be purchased here (hey cool, if you want to buy a used copy it’s only $999.11!). And also starting a second book project with the illustrious Ryan M. Milner of the College of Charleston, whose book on memes just went to contract at MIT (well, to say it’s on MEMES doesn’t really capture it — more like memetic logic, a bigger thing that you should really talk to him about). This second thing is forthcoming with Polity Press in 2017 (-ish), which I am so so excited about and three cheers and all that. Here is the blurb:
Between Play and Hate: Antagonism, Mischief, and Humor Online brings together disparate studies from a wide range of humanities disciplines in order to demystify and help contextualize digitally mediated behaviors that fall somewhere between “play” (that which is not harmless but is also not straightforwardly negative, including crass joking, identity experimentation, and ambiguous media participation) and “hate” (conspicuously damaging behaviors, including cyberbullying, hate speech, and various other malicious antagonisms). This book explores the topic from five vantage points—antagonism, identity play, audience participation, folklore, and humor—and considers key emergent discourses within digital media studies, including the political significance of digitally-mediated content, where the “offline” world ends and the “online” world begins, and the relationship between the digital humanities and traditional humanities. By asking these questions, Between Play and Hate seeks to bring a nuanced, historically situated perspective to discussions of ambivalent online behaviors.
FUN RIGHT?? We’ll also be emphasizing the extent to which technological, economic, and interpersonal infrastructures impact (shape, allow for, encourage, etc) ambiguous behavior online and off. I’ve just been working on the folklore chapter and it is glorious, my friends, just glorious. People were so FILTHY back in the day, as evidenced by this book everyone should read (and speaking of memetic logic). So yeah updates! NOW BEHAVE YOURSELVES.
