Kevin Gotkin to present at The New School this week

Kevin Gotkin

Annenberg doctoral student Kevin Gotkin will present his work at the New School's Critical Themes in Media Studies conference.

 

 

 

 

Media studies, as a field, is chiefly interested in making sense of messages, information, and communication. Yet the order-making mechanisms of media theory are increasingly challenged by the chaos of twenty-first century connectivity. The last few years have seen the rise of Internet trolling as a powerful cultural force: protracted fake YouTube sagas, high-profile parody Twitter accounts, and a seemingly endless supply of merrily malicious computer hacking. While recent scholarship has done much to explain the emergence of these phenomena, little work has been done to understand interruption as a meaningful methodological paradigm. The slippage between methods like “digital ethnography” and sites of online disturbance like the image board 4chan.org suggest that traditional methods must themselves be remediated if they are to capture the complexities that trolling illustrates. This paper argues that trolling acts as a conduit for larger problems in conducting research online and ultimately limns possible futures for media studies methods that take disruption, deception, and interruption as central characteristics of our new media environment.