The article singles out and describes the main rhetorical ingredients of trolling through contrasting it with comparable discursive practices: provocation, joke, defensive anonymity, critical public discourse, controversy, and lie. The following elements are found to play a major role in the discursive construction of trolling: topic-insensitive provocation; time-boundless jest; sadistic hierarchy of sender and receiver; anonymity of both the troll and her or his audience; choral character of the ‘actant observer’ of trolling; construction of artificial contradictory semantics; disruption of argumentative logics; irrelevance of the relation between beliefs and expressions. Trolling profoundly disrupts the conversational ethics of the human civilization because it severs expression from content, signifier from signified, communication from intention.
Wednesday, March 15, 2017
The ethics of trolling
An interesting-looking paper here by Massimo Leone. Summary:
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sounds like bullying, does raise the larger question (as does the present US administration) of how much of democracy/civility is based on norms (expectations) vs laws/rules
ReplyDeleteAgreed, on both counts
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