Gaming the Dynamics of Online Harassment

by Kevin Veale

Overview

This book argues that online harassment communities function as Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) where the collective goal is to ruin peoples’ lives. Framing these communities like ARGs highlights ways to limit their impact in the future, partly through offering people better ways to control their own safety online.

The comparison also underlines the complicity of social networks in online harassment, since the communities use their designs as tools. Social networks know this, and need to work on minimizing the problem, or acknowledge that they are profiting through promoting abuse.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030604097
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	11/12/2020
Edition description:	1st ed. 2020
Pages:	168
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

Kevin Veale is a Lecturer in Media Studies for the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Massey University in Aotearoa-New Zealand. His work focuses on storytelling across media forms, and exploring the ways that different forms of mediation shape the affective experiences of the stories they mediate.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: The Breadth of Harassment Culture, and Contextualising Gamergate.- 2. Networked Publics of Abuse.- 3. Exploring the Overlap Between Hatemobs and ARGs.- 4. Gaming the Rules.- 5. Problematic Tools and Platform Complicity.- 6. Reshaping the Landscape.- 7. Conclusion: The Christchurch Call to Action Summit, And What Follows.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"This book is a fresh and original take on the topic of online hate and harassment. Veale provides an insightful and comprehensive account of the major developments and milestones in the history of online harassment campaigns, explaining their complex dynamics, both at the level of personal interaction and platform complicity. This book is a timely contribution to a steadily growing body of work that seeks to reconceptualise online hate as terrorism, and - most importantly - to find solutions to this problem."

- Dr. Debbie Ging, Associate Professor of Media Studies, Dublin City University, UK