‘Don’t be rude on the road’: cycle blogging, trolling and lifestyle

Jones, S. ORCID: 0000-0003-4782-6646, 2013. ‘Don’t be rude on the road’: cycle blogging, trolling and lifestyle. Fibreculture Journal (22): 164. ISSN 1449-1443

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Abstract

This article examines hostile noise on the UK Guardian’s Bike Blog. Like the Internet, the bicycle has been framed as a redemptive technology at the heart of new forms of urbanity and citizenship. The article 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. It argues that a sense of community is established through the embattled relationship with a ‘petrolhead’ mode of online writing which asserts the pleasures of unrestrained lifestyle-as-fun and contests the claims to good citizenship made by pro-cycle bloggers. The article asks whether cycle blogging is constituted by its games of taste and its defensive response to trolling, or if conjoined strategies of netiquette and on-road etiquette framed in terms of ‘responsibility’, offer a route to legitimacy.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Fibreculture Journal
Creators:	Jones, S.
Publisher:	Fibreculture Publications
Date:	2013
Number:	22
ISSN:	1449-1443
Divisions:	Schools > School of Arts and Humanities
Record created by:	Jonathan Gallacher
Date Added:	01 Apr 2016 14:36
Last Modified:	07 Jun 2019 09:35
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/27279

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