Steve Jones' new article '"Don't be Rude on the Road': Cycle Blogging, Trolling and Lifestyle' is being published in the latest edition of Fibreculture.
Steve’s article examines hostile noise on the UK
Guardian’s Bike Blog. Like the Internet, the bike has been framed
as a redemptive technology at the heart of new forms of urban living
and citizenship. Steve examines these struggles, concentrating on how
accusations of trolling police the boundaries
between cycling as a sphere of autonomous play and a more ‘ethical’
disposition that links cycling to environmental and social
responsibility. He argues that a sense of community is established
through the embattled relationship with a ‘petrolhead’ mode of
on-line writing which asserts the pleasures of unrestrained
lifestyle-as-fun and contests the claims to good citizenship made by
pro-cycle bloggers. Steve asks whether cycle blogging is constituted by
its games of taste and its defensive response to trolling,
or if linked ’responsibilizing’ strategies of blog netiquette and
on-road etiquette offer a route to legitimacy.
