Blog 5: Digital Citizenship | Trolling & Social Media Conflict
This blog is a section Lifted from my personal contribution for my group presentation on Trolling and Social Media Conflict.
DO NOT FEED THEM!
Social Media, or the internet more widely, has flourished into a global haven for users from every corner of the world and has helped proliferate a generation of infinitely connected individuals from varying cultures, backgrounds and ideologies, who interact and coexist under the internet’s ever-evolving umbrella. However, a large percentage of the infinite interactions that occur and are occurring online are unavoidably unpleasant, stemming from a place where an individual or group deem themselves ‘culturally superior’ within the online environment they are operating in, and “aggrandise themselves as puppeteers” to maintain control in a decidedly vitriolic manner (Wilson et al. 2013, p.1).
This online phenomenon, as we are all fully aware, is known as “Trolling”, yet the act of which is far more complex and nuanced than the vague term suggests, with McCosker (2014 p.202) outlining, “What has come to be called trolling should be taken as a starting point rather than a vague end point for understanding the place of provocation in its multiple, highly contextualised and always changing forms.” As McCosker suggests, Internet and Social Media Trolls have earned themselves a peculiar and infamous place in the digital sphere, whereby, they seem to have developed and continuously transformed, both in groups and as individuals, into highly manipulative and deceptive internet users, who look to “repel incomers” and “deter the masses (Wilson et al. 2013, p.2)
Such anti-social behaviour has been the linchpin that Trolls and Social Media provocateurs have based their online existences upon, seemingly positioning themselves as the unofficial defenders of freedom of expression on the internet, and sole identities that are preventing the inevitable ‘homogenisation’ and ‘commercialisation’, of the web (Wilson et al. 2013, p.4). But what classifies ‘Trolling’, and how does one begin to categorise the complex depths of which these deceptive, socially disruptive savants go to in order to achieve some form of digital gratification? Wilson et al (2013 p.2) offers the Urban Dictionary’s unambiguous, albeit, considerably colloquial, definition of Trolling:
“The art of deliberately, cleverly, and secretly pissing people off, usually via the internet, using dialogue. Trolling does not mean just making rude remarks: Shouting swear words at someone doesn’t count as trolling; it’s just flaming, and isn’t funny. Spam isn’t trolling either; it pisses people off, but it’s lame. The most essential part of trolling is convincing your victim that either a) truly believe in what you are saying, no matter how outrageous, or b) give your victim malicious instructions, under the guise of help. Trolling requires decieving; any trolling that doesn’t involve decieving someone isn’t trolling at all; it’s just stupid. As such, your victim must not know that you are trolling; if he does, you are an unsuccessful troll.”
References
McCosker, A 2014, YouTrolling as provocation: Tube’s agonistics publics, Convergence, vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 201-217.
Wilson, J, Fuller, G & McCrea, C (eds) 2013, Trolls and the negative space of the internet, Fibreculture Journal, Issue 22, viewed 3 August 2016, <http://twentytwo.fibreculturejournal.org>.
