Thinking, Writing, Doing  Paid

Considering opinion making through the concept of ePunditry

by Eve Forrest (Author)
©2019, Monographs, X, 198 Pages
Media & Communication

HARDCOVER

eBook


Opinions are everywhere on the Internet. On feeds, threads and blog posts across multiple platforms, within billions of product reviews and user recommendations or via below-the-line sniping at authors. The web is teeming with thoughts and ideas.

This book examines the varied habits and practices of content creators who specialise in opinion-making online (named the «ePundits») across a number of different fields. Through interviews it explores why each chooses to blog, picture or talk about their subject area and asks: what motivates ePundits? What impact does sharing their opinions and expertise have on their life? What sets them apart from others and makes these varied performances extraordinary?

The backdrop to this new content creation are the broader changes in the media landscapes and knowledge hierarchies that ePunditry both shapes and is shaped by. Within these newly emerging ecologies the way that opinion and knowledge is produced and circulated makes ePundits highly influential but at what cost to the creator? This book explores these evolving opinion spheres from the perspective of producers acknowledging that, in such a ruthless attention economy, to stay relevant they must keep thinking, writing and doing.

Cover
Contents
Acknowledgements
Prologue: Calling out across digital fields
Chapter 1 Who or what is the ePundit*?
Are we all bloggers now?
ePunditry and post-truth ecologies
Exploring new ecologies of opinion-expression
E is for expression, experiences, ethnography
Performed opinions
E is for expertise
Chapter 2 Locating opinion-making within media ecologies
Labels, imagery and metaphors
Facts, fictions and epistolary spaces
New/old mythologies
When folklore settles, myths are made
Medium in a mirror
New territories of readership
Talking to an empty room
Considering the grand disruption
Chapter 3 Frothing and foaming in the political opinion sphere
‘Communities’ in bubbles
Political comment spheres
Opinion atmospherics: Finding texture online
Embracing the foam: Moving into the Twittersphere
Moving from spheres to globes
Chapter 4 Opinion-making and expertise in post-truth spheres
Opinion and expertise in the era of big data
E is for ‘everyday’ expert
What makes an expert?
The limits of expertise
New ecologies of expertise
Who wants to be an expert? The rejection of the expert label
Collideorscopes, chaos, collectivism
Chapter 5 Writing themselves into being
Phenomenological approaches to opinion-making online
E is for embodied: Considering corporeal opinion-expression
Into the world of solitary sociability: Thinking and writing habits
When thinking flows, when thinking stops
Writing as catharsis, writing as compulsion
E is for ‘extreme’: Anger, antagonism and outrageous opinion
Letting the wind carry you
Chapter 6 Show then tell: The visual turn within opinion-making
Images and news
Unspeakable opinions: Considering political cartoons
Stock images versus opinion-making
E is for ‘emulate’: Imagery in fashion and parenting blogs
Moving beyond words
Chapter 7 Performing punditry
News and opinion as performance
Truthful performances, or the search for authenticity
Affect and storytelling
Liminality
Writing as dancing: A space between choreography and improvisation
Making trouble: Stories of womanhood
Seeking anonymity: Performing behind cloaks and screens
Embracing the blessed unrest
Chapter 8 The multiple threads that bind us
Working through ideas within the opinion tapestry
Unpicking and unpacking the folds of experience
TL;DR: Everyone’s a critic
Alternative approaches to everyday expertise
Restructuring of knowledge hierarchies
Being a writer-in-the-world
A life lived together (and alone) in spheres
Bibliography
Appendix
Index
Pages:
X, 198
Year:
2019
ISBN (HARDBACK):
9783034322546 (Active)
ISBN (EPUB):
9781787075443 (Active)
ISBN (PDF):
9781787075436 (Active)
Language:
English
Published:
Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, New York, Wien, 2019. X, 198 pp.

Eve Forrest wears many hats. She is an independent scholar, freelance author and works for Newcastle University in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science Impact team, helping researchers communicate the findings of their projects to the wider world. Her research interests include photography, embodiment, technology and phenomenology.

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