Literature Review I

Okay, this is part one of the literature review.

What exactly is my topic? Where am I going with all this business about trolls?

The basic premise is that trolling occurs in abundance on the Internet, but not (at least not visibly) in "real life." So then, there must be something about the context of the Internet that is particularly conducive to trolling. The anonymity of the Internet, lack of accountability, and resulting freedom of speech and/or action (so to say) are potential factors. It is a new context for social interaction in which people can be more or less anonymous, and can be alone yet very, very public.

The question I am exploring is thus: Is trolling a response to this new context? A response to the collapse? Is trolling behavior the result of people trying to define a new social situation by pushing the limits of traditional social norms (i.e., generally polite behavior)?

Let us look at early trolling. Michele Tepper, in chapter 3 of Internet Culture, ed. David Porter, describes troll dynamics in Usenet groups, such as alt.folklore.urban, as a sort of game of information. The game reveals who is an insider of the community and who is an outsider (see chapter 3, Usenet Communities and the Cultural Politics of Information, on Google Books). Some of the "bait" put out to catch unwitting newbies is made up of inside jokes, group habits, basically things that are part of the collective memory of the community, and therefore part of the group's identity. This is an older book, published in 1997, but useful as a sort of historical (if only 12 years old) perspective on trolling.

(Interesting sidenote: alt.folklore.urban is the precursor of snopes.com, the site that debunks popular urban myths.)


But that's just one kind of trolling. There's a totally different kind of trolling where outsiders set "bait" for the members of a particular group. In chapter 2 of Communities in CyberSpace, ed. Marc Smith and Peter Kollock, Identity and deception in the virtual community (on Google books, scroll to page 45), Judith Donath describes this more aggressive type of trolling behavior as a form of identity deception that can potentially disrupt the community's interactions, as opposed to strengthening the ties between insiders through some shared injoke, as in Tepper's version of trolling.

Donath refers to trolling as "category deception," (p. 49). That is, trolls are acting, playing a role in order to deceive people into believing they are a certain type of person (such as a naive kid, an idiot, etc.). Except, in this type of acting the actor is the one who is entertained.

More to come.