ABSTRACT
The goal of media scholarship is to help people understand the histories and afterlives of communicative forms. Digital or “new” media presents challenges because of its ephemerality, massive scale, and emergent qualities, requiring people to analyze it while living in it. Memes, user-produced mashup images that combine familiar figures such as cats, cartoons, badly drawn Micro Soft Paint images, and text have received particular attention as indispensable and characteristic tools of the right. Internet harassment shifts and adapts along with new platforms, growing in parallel with them as they get bigger and more popular. Zoombombing is more than just trolling; though it belongs to a broad category of online behavior meant to produce a negative reaction, it has an intimate connection with online conspiracy theorists and white supremacists. Trolling is both an act of aggression meant to situate the victim as unwanted and unwelcome, and a way to codify shared values for the subcultural group that deploys these tactics.
