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This book examines the varied habits and practices of content creators who specialise in opinion making online, across a number of different fields. 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?

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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.

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CONTENTS: Calling out across digital fields - Who or what is the ePundit ? - Locating opinion-making within media ecologies - Frothing and foaming in the political opinion sphere - Opinion-making and expertise in post-truth spheres - Writing themselves into being - Show then tell: The visual turn within opinion-making - Performing punditry - The multiple threads that bind us.

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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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