A critical look at trolling subculture and how we talk about it(theatlantic.com)
theatlantic.com
A critical look at trolling subculture and how we talk about it
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/what-an-academic-who-wrote-her-dissertation-on-trolls-thinks-of-violentacrez/263631/
4 comments
[deleted]
About 1900 too many words spent on trolling as a topic
If you run online communities it's important to understand troll mentality.
For many of us, it's beyond our thinking.
For many of us, it's beyond our thinking.
I get called a troll by people all the time for the simple crime of making an argument they can't refute.
The guy on reddit wasn't a troll, near as I can tell, he was a guy who started a lot of subreddits and provided content for them. Seems to be the opposite of a troll, even if the subreddits were in content areas we might not like, the people who went to them apparently did. Yet The Atlantic writes an article about him?
A real troll, in my understanding, is someone whose goal is to disrupt conversation.
But these seem very rare.
"Troll" has become the catch all excuse to ignore and attack people you disagree with, near as I can tell.
The guy on reddit wasn't a troll, near as I can tell, he was a guy who started a lot of subreddits and provided content for them. Seems to be the opposite of a troll, even if the subreddits were in content areas we might not like, the people who went to them apparently did. Yet The Atlantic writes an article about him?
A real troll, in my understanding, is someone whose goal is to disrupt conversation.
But these seem very rare.
"Troll" has become the catch all excuse to ignore and attack people you disagree with, near as I can tell.
Trolling is a mixture of things.
1 part 'crosspost alt.os.linux and alt.os.windows with a "Mac is superior" post'
1 part 'I destroy your life for the fun of it'
1 part 'I make the people who do despicable things suffer as much as I can'
1 part 'its funny as a group cause we all laugh in unison'
1 part 'Who cares'
"Ethnographic in approach, this dissertation examines trolling, an online subculture devoted to meme creation and social disruption. Rather than framing trolling behaviors as fundamentally aberrant, I argue that trolls are agents of cultural digestion; they scour the landscape, repurpose the most exploitable material, then shove the resulting monstrosities into the faces of an unsuspecting populace.
Within the political and social context of the United States, the region to which I have restricted my focus, I argue that trolls on 4chan/b/ and Facebook digest and often perform a grotesque pantomime of a number of pervasive cultural logics, including masculine domination (Bourdieu 2001) and white privilege (Dyer 1997). Additionally, I argue that the rhetorical and behavioral tactics embraced by trolls, including sensationalism, spectacle, and emotional exploitation, are homologous to tactics routinely deployed by American corporate media outlets. In short, trolling operates within existing systems, not in contrast to, immediately complicating, and often ironizing, knee-jerk condemnations of trolling behaviors."