Suchergebnisse

This article presents a new social framework for understanding the origins of trolling and its expansion from an obscure practice, limited to a handful of boards on Usenet, to a pervasive component of Internet culture. I argue that trolling originated, in the term of sociologists, as a form of boundary maintenance that served to distinguish communities of self-identified online insiders from others beyond the boundaries of their community and to drive outsiders away from their spaces. This framework can help us to better understand the transformations that trolling has undergone in the decades since its inception, as well as the persistence of misogyny and prejudice throughout the history of the practice.

Abstract
This article takes a comparative look at the annotative models and devices that readers have used historically to organize the information in texts, in order to better understand the needs that readers bring to the digital environment. Based on what we can discover about the factors that brought about major changes in models and devices of note-taking in the past, what can we learn – as we design new forms of note-taking and annotation for the digital age – about the approaches to design that seem likely to have the most lasting impact? As this tour d'horizon shows, even in the gadget-driven digital environment, social activity plays a determining role in shaping the forms that annotation tools adopt and even the definition of what a reader is and needs.

Abstract
This article is a study of literary mediation in the age of the e-book. It focuses on a specific editorial project being undertaken by scholarly editors in the present day, when the late age of print is giving way to the digital age. The author argues that the present moment represents a deceptively strong period for print publishing, but an uncertain and experimental period for literature, a time when the values and practices that order the literary field are no longer well-defined. The spread of digital culture is reconfiguring the make-up of the reading public, shaping readers as 'prosumers' who at once consume and manipulate content. Just as importantly, hyper-mediation and media convergence are forcing critics to confront an 'unbinding of the book' that began in practice decades before the Internet age. As professional mediators, editors occupy an ideal position to register the opportunities and the pressures of these processes, whether they are literary entrepreneurs or scholars implicated in literature as an institution. Their efforts to delimit literary texts and sell them as a particular kind of cultural institution show how the game of literature and its rules of play change shape under the pressures of new media configurations and new social worlds.