Not quite funereal, but not at all celebratory: a wistful, sad, and sometimes angry wake. The feeling of last night’s party, held to mark the end of Gawker’s independence, was, unlike the product that Gawker and its sister blogs put out, understated. Next week, the company’s assets will go up for auction, and the famously independent blogging collective will end up with a corporate parent. Gawker had to go request permission from its creditors to host the party on a meager $1,000 budget. That the gathering happened at all was a small triumph. The lawsuit was later revealed to have been funded by the Facebook billionaire Peter Thiel - the subject of a 2007 Gawker story titled “Peter Thiel is totally gay, people.” Gawker has appealed the verdict, but Florida law requires that a bond be posted during the appeals process in order to gather the money to post that bond, Gawker was forced to declare bankruptcy and sell its assets. Gawker filed for bankruptcy last month, and Denton was recounting, to an audience that knew the story very well because most of them were characters in it, how the experimental, one-man tech blog he launched in 2002 had become Gawker Media: enormously influential, widely read, consistently profitable, and, now, brought to its knees by a professional wrestler, a Florida judge, and a Facebook billionaire.Įarlier this year, a Florida jury levied an enormous $140 million judgment against the company over a 2012 post that excerpted a video showing Hulk Hogan having sex with a friend’s wife. Gawker’s enormous new offices? The year 2016? A week away from sale at auction? You could be forgiven for not being quite sure where “here” was. In this way, nerd/geek masculinity turns the very traits nerds and geeks are often mocked for into evidence of manhood – as the cost of excluding women and queer people from nerd and geek culture.“The fact that we’re here is a freakin’ miracle,” Gawker CEO Nick Denton said last night, addressing a crowd from the base of an enormous set of stairs. Examining three case studies, the novel Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, the neoreactionary political ideology, and the #GamerGate controversy, the dissertation suggests that nerd/geek masculinity responds to a perceived emasculation of men who identify as nerds or geeks by constructing the interests, skills, and behaviors of nerd/geek culture as inherently male traits. This dissertation proposes the concept of nerd/geek masculinity to understand discourses of hegemonic masculinity in nerd/geek culture. As a subculture, nerd/geek culture tends to be described in terms of the experiences of men and boys who are unpopular because of their niche interests or lack of social skills. Nerd and geek culture have become subjects of increasing public concern in recent years, with growing visibility and power for technical professions and increasing relevance of video games, science fiction, and fantasy in popular culture. Understanding that the theory of cultivation (Morgan, 2009) may have played a pivotal role in the initiation and explosion of the internet hate mob and by viewing this social phenomenon through the eyes of a former game developer, I hope to illustrate how the specific content choices could have cultivated a modified world view regarding gender roles and sexuality generated by the video games they consume to amplify existing gender roles. Viewing GamerGate through the lens of cultivation theory, we begin to see the action as the result of nearly three decades of questionable content potentially cultivating the digital video games audience. This action spread, morphing into an ex post facto justification (Read, 2016) to continue their harassment campaign to also include commentaries on the nature of digital games in the broader culture generated as a response to their initial actions (Alexander, 'Gamers' don't have to be your audience. Using digital technologies like twitter, facebook, and online communities of practice like 4chan, agents of this harassment action attempted to discredit the target of Eron’s angst and began “CRASHING HER CAREER WITH NO SURVIVORS” (LOG, 2014) along with anyone that defended her. In August of 2014, a harassment campaign initiated by Eron Gjonji exposed the underbelly of digital game culture to the rest of the world.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |