Wednesday, March 15, 2017

The ethics of trolling

An interesting-looking paper here by Massimo Leone. Summary:
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.

2 comments:

  1. 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

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