A moment for hate: an unexpected theme at IR14

While the official theme of the Association of Internet Researchers 14th annual conference was “resistance + appropriation,” it was striking that a number of panels, papers, and plenary talks touched on a kind of “resistant” digital practice that is less utopian. Hate and hating in its various incarnations — contrary to likes and hearts, or dissent for social justice — was the topic of discussion in many rooms at the downtown Denver Westin. In nearly any time slot, one could attend talks discussing online incivility addressed from a range of perspectives, and discussed in terms of the Internet as a racist machine (Lisa Nakamura’s plenary talk), the “anti-social web” (a panel chaired by Daniel Greene), the problematic hegemonic tendencies of the Internet (a paper on reddit by Adrienne Massanari), anti-fandoms (which emerged in a panel on fan culture by Mel Stanfill), and of course, haters (in a fishbowl with Kate Miltner, Alice Marwick, and Whitney Phillips entitled ‘Haters Gonna Hate’?). In each of these discussions, hate and its vicissitudes were complicated by entangled and ambivalent relationships with a range of topics, from technology to play to freedom of speech to participatory culture.