Technoculture and the Alt-Right: From #GamerGate to the 2016 Election Main Menu Technoculture Gendered History of Video Games The Digital Community of 4chan and the History of #GamerGate Steve Bannon, Richard Spencer, and the Continuing Community of Discontents Conclusions: The Ripples of Technoculture Bibliography

Introduction

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With the advent of new media technologies such as Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit, we have the opportunity to study how social movements and media effects have changed in the last few decades. Specifically, this paper seeks to analyze the history and consequences of the online media event #GamerGate. Perhaps more importantly, I will examine the link between the communities that participated heavily in the #GamerGate movement and the modern alt-right movement championed by Steve Bannon and Richard Spencer. 

I will examine these topics with the help of a wide range of scholarship across several fields such as anthropology, communication studies, as well as political and computer sciences. A particular emphasis will be placed on the significance of technoculture, a term coined by Constance Penley and Andrew Ross in their edited volume that bears that same title (1991) . I will examine what technoculture is and why it is important to modern social and political movements, specifically focussing on the consequences evident in the 2016 US election cycle. 

This paper does not seek to answer any specifically outlined research questions other than the simple question of if there is a link between earlier technocultures such as those of 4chan and Redddit and the alt-right (there is). Rather, the importance of this paper should be marked as a call to attention for the significance of technocultures and cyber-sociality in modern social and political spheres. 

This page has paths:

  1. Homepage Jordan C. Keck

Contents of this path:

  1. Gendered History of Video Games
  2. Technoculture
  3. The Digital Community of 4chan and the History of #GamerGate
  4. Steve Bannon, Richard Spencer, and the Continuing Community of Discontents
  5. Conclusions: The Ripples of Technoculture