Rosewarne - Cyberbullies, cyberactivists, cyberpredators: film, TV, and internet stereotypes

Lauren Rosewarnes Cyberbullies, Cyberactivists, Cyberpredators: Film, TV, and Internet Stereotypes is mind-boggling. The scholarship is beyond comprehensive and the analysis is astute, clear, and fair-minded. This book is a treasure for students of popular culture and for anyone interested in the demonization of technology.

David Anderegg, PhD, Professor of Psychology, Bennington College
Author of Nerds: How Dorks, Dweebs, Technies and Trekkies Can Save America

Timely, engaging and witty, Dr. Rosewarnes book explores a fascinating paradox: the real worlds enthusiastic and loving embrace of the Internet contrasted with the Webs dangerous and often horrific reflection in the media. Focusing on the dramatic depiction of the users and losers hiding anonymously behind computer screensnetgeeks, nerds, neckbeards, haters, hackers, perverts, and gothic misanthropes, Dr. Rosewarne smoothly integrates her provocative viewpoint with hundreds of media examples and wide-ranging research in psychology, sociology, law, media criticism, gender, and racial studies. She succeeds in exposing our fears about this technology as a medium of crime, rape culture, terrorism, and xenophobia.

Dan Dinello, Professor Emeritus, Columbia College Chicago
Author of Technophobia! Science Fiction Visions of Posthuman Technology

Lauren Rosewarne has an encyclopedic knowledge of geeks, computer nerds, cyberbullies, cyberpredators, and other dodgy denizens of the Internet. This book displays not only her amazingly in-depth knowledge of these stereotypes as they are portrayed in popular culture but her sophisticated analysis of why they tend to be so negative, all wrapped up in entertaining prose.

Deborah Lupton, Centenary Professor, Faculty of Arts & Design, University of Canberra
Author of Digital Sociology

This detailed and thoughtful treatment of mass mediated depictions of the Internet (and its users) makes a significant contribution to contemporary media studies. The book systematically examines the way television and film characterize, narrativize, and often demonize the Internet and its users. Lauren Rosewarne offers an exhaustive study of representations of cybersex, cybergeography, cyberbullying, cyberstalking, and cyberactivism. Her work is a must read for students and scholars interested in the ways new technologies are incorporated and symbolized into modern society.

A. Susan Owen, PhD, Professor, University of Puget Sound
Co-author of Bad Girls: Cultural Politics and Media Representations of Transgressive Women

Rosewarne covers a wide range of cyber-subjects and subjectivities in an approachable, yet meticulous manner, analyzing hundreds of films, programs, games, and other key texts central to digital culture. Readers, students and researchers interested in the Internet and cyber-culture as a site of power, desire, and identity will no-doubt find this comprehensive and probing book essential reading.

Derek A. Burrill, Associate Professor, Dept. of Media and Cultural Studies, UC Riverside
Author of Die Tryin: Videogames, Masculinity, Culture

Rosewarne shines the light on cyber tropes and stereotypes used in a variety of media outlets. The text is an admirable mix of theoretical assessment and pop culture references that helps everyone from academics to casual media users understand the cumulative power of media representations.

Patrice A. Oppliger, PhD, Assistant Professor of Mass Communication, Boston University
Author of Bullies and Mean Girls in Popular Culture

Lauren Rosewarnes Cyberbullies, Cyberactivists, Cyberpredators provides a rich and vibrant ethnography of several major online personality types. This book will introduce the reader to a cast of delightfully eccentric characters: the netgeek, the neckbeard, the bully, the hacker, the predator, the pervert. As Dr. Rosewarne clearly demonstrates, these Internet archetypes are sometimes beautiful, sometimes frightening, and always fascinating. Best of all, Dr. Rosewarne uses lively and engaging descriptive prose to show how these Internet personality types are represented (and often misrepresented) in a wide variety of popular films and television shows. This book will be of great interest to scholars who study the sociology, anthropology, psychology, or history of the Internet, and anyone who wants to learn about the complexities of representation in popular culture.

Lewis Call, Associate Professor and Chair of History, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
Author of BDSM in American Science Fiction and Fantasy

Cyberbullies, Cyberactivists, Cyberpredators addresses the construction of Internet culture as both dangerous and threatening. Elucidating on such topics as the netgeek, hacker, and cybergoth, Rosewarne critiques representations of gender, race, sexuality, disability, and even vegetarianism in a lucidly written account of our technophobic media culture.

Sarah E. S. Sinwell, Assistant Professor, Department of Film and Media Arts, University of Utah

For scholars and consumers of media, this is a skillfully constructed, must-read text. Lauren Rosewarnes contribution provides a much needed examination of contemporary and controversial discourses inherent within digital spaces and media technologies. This book makes a significant addition to the emergent scholarship on contemporary engagements with the nature of identity and stereotyping in the digital era. The taxonomy proposed has the ability to contextualize mainstream controversies currently manifesting in digital spaces that are eroding the experiences for some marginalized users.

Kishonna L. Gray, PhD, Assistant Professor, School of Justice Studies, Eastern Kentucky University
Author of Race, Gender, and Deviance in Xbox Live: Theoretical Perspectives from the Virtual Margins

In Cyberbullies, Cyberactivists, Cyberpredators Lauren Rosewarne spotlights some of the dark and disturbing recesses of popular culture and the Internet. What happens, she asks, when past oddball stereotypes become mainstream... when yesterdays movies and todays virtual reality becomereal? Cyberbullies deftly illuminates disparities between media representations and media-saturated reality. Parts are NSFW.

Thomas J. Misa, Director, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota
Editor of Gender Codes: Why Women Are Leaving Computing

Lauren Rosewarnes book provides a deep perspective on how society has come to perceive, and represent, the many faces of people who have made their lives around the Internet and the technologies that drive it. Societys relationship with technology, the Internet and its inhabitants is complicated and portrayed as something to be feared. Rosewarne takes the reader through a detailed and insightful view of six common cyber-stereotypes and provides a thoroughly referenced analysis of how they are portrayed in film, TV, the news, and the Internet itself. Through this, Rosewarne examines the roots of this largely negative portrayal to an explanation of why the Internet and the people commonly associated with it should be (mis)represented in this way.

This is a fascinating book that anyone who is interested in how technology shapes society should read. This is especially true of the journalists, TV, and film writers and producers largely responsible for these views. Rosewarnes book is a fascinating and highly readable analysis that is thoroughly researched and referenced.

Dr David Glance, Director, UWA Centre for Software Practice