1st Edition
Digital Ethics Rhetoric and Responsibility in Online Aggression
Digital Ethics delves into the shifting legal and ethical landscape in digital spaces and explores productive approaches for theorizing, understanding, and navigating through difficult ethical issues online.
Contributions from leading scholars address how changing technologies and media over the last decade have both created new ethical quandaries and reinforced old ones in rhetoric and writing studies. Through discussions of rhetorical theory, case studies and examples, research methods and methodologies, and pedagogical approaches and practical applications, this collection will further digital rhetoric scholars’ inquiry into digital ethics and writing instructors’ approaches to teaching ethics in the current technological moment.
A key contribution to the literature on ethical practices in digital spaces, this book will be of interest to researchers and teachers in the fields of digital rhetoric, composition, and writing studies.
Foreword: Friends, Enemies, and Strangers Online
James E. Porter
1. Introduction: Toward an Ethic of Responsibility in Digital Aggression
Jessica Reyman and Erika M. Sparby
Part I: Ethics of Interfaces and Platforms
2. Hateware and the Outsourcing of Responsibility
James J. Brown Jr. and Gregory C. Hennis III
3. Values vs. Rules in Social Media Communities: How Platforms Generate
Amorality on reddit and Facebook
Michael Trice, Liza Potts, and Rebekah Small
4. Finding Effective Moderation Practices on Twitch
Tabitha M. London, Joey Crundwell, Marcy Bock Eastley, Natalie Santiago, and Jennifer Jenkins
5. A Pedagogy of Ethical Interface Production Based on Virtue Ethics
John R. Gallagher
Part II: Academic Discourse in Digital Publics
6. Feminist Research on the Toxic Web: The Ethics of Access, Affective Labor, and
Harassment
Leigh Gruwell
7. Maybe She can Be a Feminist and Still Claim her own Opinions? The Story of
an Accidental Counter-Troll, A treatise in 9 movements
Vyshali Manivannan
8. Professorial Outrage: Enthymemic Assumptions
Jeff Rice
Part III: Cultural Narratives in Hostile Discourses
9. Hateful Games: Why White Supremacist Recruiters Target Gamers and How to
Stop Them
Megan Condis
10. Theorycraft and Online Harassment: Mobilizing Status Quo Warriors
Alisha Karabinus
11. Volatile Visibility: How Online Harassment Makes Women Disappear
Bridget Gelms
Part IV: Circulation and Amplification of Digital Aggression
12. Confronting Digital Aggression with an Ethics of Circulation
Brandy Dieterle, Dustin Edwards, and Paul "Dan" Martin
13. The Banality of Digital Aggression: Algorithmic Data Surveillance in Medical
Wearables
Krista Kennedy and Noah Wilson
14. Fostering Phronesis in Digital Rhetorics: Developing a Rhetorical and Ethical
Approach to Online Engagements
Katherine DeLuca
Biography
Jessica Reyman is Associate Professor of Digital Rhetoric and Professional Writing in the Department of English at Northern Illinois University, USA. Her research focuses on law and ethics in digital rhetoric, and she has published the monograph The Rhetoric of Intellectual Property: Copyright Law and the Regulation of Digital Culture (Routledge,2010), as well as numerous peer reviewed articles and book chapters.
Erika M. Sparby is Assistant Professor of Digital Rhetoric and Technical Communication at Illinois State University, USA. Her research interests include online aggression, memes, identity, and digital ethics, and her work has appeared in Computers and Composition. Her dissertation, Memes and 4chan and Haters, Oh My! Rhetoric, Identity, and Online Aggression, won the 2017 Hugh Burns Best Dissertation Award.
