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Friday, 5 July 2013

Petrolheads and Red Light Jumpers

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.

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