FCJ-164 ‘Don’t be Rude on the Road’: Cycle Blogging, Trolling and Lifestyle

This article examines hostile noise on the UK Guardian’s Bike Blog. Like the Internet, the bicycle has been framed as a redemptive technology at the heart of new forms of urbanity and citizenship. The article examines these struggles, concentrating on how accusations of trolling police the boundaries between cycling as a sphere of autonomous play and a more ‘ethical’ disposition that links cycling to environmental and social responsibility. It argues that a sense of community is established through the embattled relationship with a ‘petrolhead’ mode of online writing which asserts the pleasures of unrestrained lifestyle-as-fun and contests the claims to good citizenship made by pro-cycle bloggers. The article asks whether cycle blogging is constituted by its games of taste and its defensive response to trolling, or if conjoined strategies of netiquette and on-road etiquette framed in terms of ‘responsibility’, offer a route to legitimacy.