// archives

online discourse

This tag is associated with 5 posts

FCJ-159 /b/lack up: What Trolls Can Teach Us About Race

By ⋅ December 30, 2013 ⋅ Post a comment

Tanner Higgin Independent Scholar I hate racists (even if I sometimes play one on the internet). Paulie Socash (Phillips, 2012) Closing Pools, Posing Questions I’d been a fringe observer of 4chan and /b/ for years, aware but ignorant of its pleasures and horrors. Then in a particularly aimless night of YouTube browsing, I watched something that plunged me into the /b/ abyss. It was a player made World of Warcraft (WOW) machinima video featuring a white human avatar dressed in plain clothes and a wide brimmed hat. This wasn’t remarkable, but what followed him—a group of dark skinned human avatars—was. Couched in a Benny Hill sensibility, the video featured a pack of ‘slaves’ who chased and were chased by the ‘slave master’ through the city of Stormwind to crowds of (one can assume) perplexed, entertained, and offended onlookers. The ‘slave chase video’ as I refer to it (it’s long since […]

FCJ-166 ‘Change name to No One. Like people’s status’ Facebook Trolling and Managing Online Personas

By ⋅ December 30, 2013 ⋅ Post a comment

Tero Karppi University of Turku, Finland Whitney Phillips (2012: 3) has recently argued that in order to understand trolls and trolling we should focus on ‘what trolls do’ and how the behaviour of trolls ‘fit[s] in and emerge[s] alongside dominant ideologies.’ [1] For Phillips dominant ideologies are connected to the ‘corporate media logic.’ Her point is that social media platforms are not objective or ‘neutral’, but function according to certain cultural and economic logic and reproduce that logic through the platforms at various levels. [2] The premise, which I will build on in this article, is that the logic of a social media platform can be explored through the troll. In the following I will discuss how trolls and trolling operate alongside Facebook’s politics and practices of user participation and user agency. I provide a material “close reading” of two particular types of trolls and trolling within Facebook – the […]

FCJ-167 Spraying, fishing, looking for trouble: The Chinese Internet and a critical perspective on the concept of trolling

By ⋅ December 30, 2013 ⋅ Post a comment

Gabriele de Seta Department of Applied Social Sciences, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. ‘There is always need for a certain degree of civilisation before it is possible to understand this kind of humor" Wang Xiaobo, Civilisation and Satire’ Introduction: Why trolls, why China? As an interdisciplinary field, Internet research is in the challenging position of having to work out useful concepts and categories from precarious jargons, concepts and categories that are constantly tested against, and challenged by, the magmatic and unpredictable development of Internet cultures. From “netiquette” and “hacking” to “cyberspace” itself (The Economist, 1997), the fascinating vocabulary of Internet research constantly runs the risk of falling out of date and revealing the failure of academia to keep pace with the fast metamorphoses of online interaction. The ephemeral vernaculars of Internet cultures are often preserved by academic accounts in partial renditions of terms decoupled from their current usage, crystallised definitions […]

FCJ-161 Productive Provocations: Vitriolic Media, Spaces of Protest and Agonistic Outrage in the 2011 England Riots

By ⋅ December 30, 2013 ⋅ Post a comment

Anthony McCosker Swinburne University, Faculty of Life and Social Sciences Amelia Johns Deakin University, Centre for Citizenship and Globalisation To act, then, is neither arriving at a scene nor fleeing from it, but actually engaging in its creation. (Isin, 2008: 27) Introduction The intense social upheaval that spread through a number of UK cities in what became known variously as the ‘London riots’, ‘England’s summer of disorder’, or more generally the ‘2011 England riots’, signalled the terrifying speed with which passionate disaffection can turn to uncontained violence. In the aftermath, much investment was made in searches for causes, as governments, scholars and the general public wondered how normally peaceful city streets across the country could come to resemble a war zone. Much of the commentary in the mainstream media reflected traditional ideological debates between the left and right of the political spectrum. Conservative politicians blaming the events on the actions […]

FCJ-157 Still ‘Searching for Safety Online’: collective strategies and discursive resistance to trolling and harassment in a feminist network

By ⋅ December 30, 2013 ⋅ Post a comment

Frances Shaw University of Sydney ‘Trolling in a feminist forum’ redux The issues of trolling and cyberbullying are often linked in the media (see for example Brockie, 2012, which is emblematic of these discourses). Although both harassers and trolls are present as a problem for feminist blogs, I see trolling and harassment as separate issues. I take a more ambivalent approach to trolling, not assuming that trolling is always harassing, and indeed demarcating harassment as a slightly different issue. In what follows I review both the academic literature on trolling and strategies to deal with the trolls (particularly in feminist discursive contexts), and then review discourses on trolling and moderation in my interviews with participants from Australian feminist blogging networks. My research on feminist blogs in Australia comprised interviews with 20 bloggers from around Australia between the period November 2009 and March 2010. The network that I studied was defined […]

—