Review: This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

In the Winter 2018 quarter I was enrolled in a wonderful course “Ethnographies of Technology” with Dr. Valerie Olson in the UCI Anthropology Department.

Each participant in the class was asked to select a book that they considered to be an interesting example of an ethnography of technology published in the last decade. And instead of writing a final seminar paper, Valerie tasked us with writing an academic book review.

I selected This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture by Whitney Phillips. Some of the research I’m currently conducting is examining identity work in game communities, particularly practices of identity exclusion that punish outsiders, such as harassment.

My review of the text, as well as reviews of other ethnographies of tech, can be found on the Techno_ethno website run by Valerie.

Review: This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things