Anonymous online viewer commentary echoes mainstream cultural critics, so dismissal as fringe is unfounded

Evidence

Unlike responses from film and television critics, viewer posts to the Internet represent an unstable archive; they are often anonymous, and the source cannot be verified. They are fragments of larger sentiments, operating like eavesdropping into conversations for which the larger context is absent. Juana Maria Rodriguez refers to online exchanges as “textual performances: fleeting, transient, ephemeral, already post. Like the text of a play, they leave a trace to which meaning can be assigned, but these traces are haunted by the absence that was the performance itself, its reception, and its emotive power.” After being immersed in the often rabid and frequently misspelled rantings on Internet fan message boards, it is tempting to conclude that these posters are a very small subsection of the United States and that they certainly do not represent a mainstream perspective. Such a temptation, however, must be resisted, because these same voices are found among mainstream cultural critics. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 269

Categorization

• DEFINE: Rodriguez’s conception of online posts as ‘textual performances’ is a genuinely useful analytical frame worth preserving.
• QUESTION: Methodologically intriguing: how does one responsibly treat an unstable, anonymous archive as evidence of mainstream sentiment? Worth chasing the methodology question.