This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture (Information Society Series) by Whitney Phillips

Author:Whitney Phillips
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: online etiquette, internet users, moral aspects, Online chat groups, ethical aspects, online identities, internet trolls, Internet
ISBN: 9780262329002
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2015-03-20T04:00:00+00:00

The Mask of Trolling, Revisited

Building upon my previous discussion of the mask of trolling, this section will consider the cultural circumstances by and through which the mask of trolling was forged. It will also explicate the ways in which trolling behaviors mirror—and therefore shine an uncomfortable spotlight on—conventional behaviors and attitudes. Three discrete factors will be considered: the relationship between mass mediation, emotional distance, and off-color laughter; the ways in which trolling behaviors replicate the logic of social media, particularly its celebration of the end user; and the behavioral implications of political upheaval.

Rubbish Rubbish Everywhere

The first factor undergirding the mask of trolling is the relationship between mass mediation and dissociative humor. Christie Davies posits this connection in his essay “Jokes That Follow Mass Mediated Disaster in a Global Electronic Age.” Davies argues that, rather than merely expressing callousness, laughter in the face of violent or otherwise tragic events bespeaks a particular set of historical and technological conditions.2 As Davies explains, “sick” humor has been around since people began writing down jokes. But even the sickest jokes did not, as far as anyone can tell, take the form of the modern disaster joke. Moreover, while people certainly commented upon gruesome news, this commentary never evolved into traceable joke cycles (clusters of jokes that emerge, evolve, and eventually plateau in response to specific tragedies). Significant historical events have inspired quite a bit of retroactive joking—for example, the sinking of the Titanic or the assassination of Abraham Lincoln—but Davies contends that this humor didn’t become prominent until after the events were widely theatricalized.3

As Davies explains, the first major disaster joke cycle followed President Kennedy’s assassination and coincided with what he describes as the “total triumph of television.”4 Davies presents three causes for this connection. First, he argues, disasters in the television age are followed and preceded by “rubbish,” creating an incongruous package to respond to, therefore complicating or outright undermining normal expressions of human empathy. Second, television blurs the line between reality and fantasy, fact and fiction. Live disasters are thus conflated with fictional representations of disasters, precluding the viewer from truly believing that the event has taken place, and mitigating the impact of real tragedy when it really strikes. Finally, the experience of watching a televised tragedy is mediated by space, time, and geography, facilitating and sometimes even necessitating emotional detachment, and therefore cynical or comedic responses.5

Although Davies’s analysis is focused on the ways in which television spurs disaster joke cycles—he does address the Internet, but writing in the early 2000s sees the web more as an infinite bulletin board than an actively generative social space6—his underlying argument is directly applicable to the contemporary Internet. In fact, I would argue that today’s Internet, which is more incongruous then the most scattered variety show, which collapses the boundaries of reality and fantasy even further, and which posits ever-greater distance between viewer and that which is viewed, handily outmediates television.

Of course I want to avoid the assumptions, with which Davies seems to flirt, that

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