Blog 16 - Hypermess

NB - One of the main thrusts here is pretty much "trolling: where are we now? or "trolling scholarship: beyond usenet" since there are now increased capabilities (for more people I might add) to do more damage than verbal harassment.

I also left in some of the feminist focus, since I like the idea - trolling's far bigger than that, I'm just really interested in the behavior/reception of online "specialist" groups.

This needs focus, obviously, and scrubbing of anything political-sounding and occasional mild profanity - so just have a look and let me know what you'd like me to do with all this.
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The Messy Draft:

This is now something different than textual catcalling and insults (turning point - Mr Bungle? See "A Rape in Cyberspace"). More people have more access to tools which can let them take the harassment to the real world (Megan Meier, Kathy Sierra, Epilepsy Foundation Site). Trolling is primarily (according to trolls) an attempt to take the wind out of a group, to get them to not take the net so seriously - my aim here is not to defend overreacting about internet squabbles but to identify a new trend that *is* worthy of attention and *does* necessitate action in real life. (access to phone numbers, social security numbers, addresses - it's all out there, but if you're determined enough you can find them and actually do damage to people, not just their message boards or characters.)

The dramatic, headline grabbing "trolls" (Meier case, Malwebolence article) may not be the norm, but there does exist a "mood" of entitlement, false anonymity, and freedom from the "net'" of physical/nonverbal cues that allow face to face discussion to either proceed more or less civilly, or at least censure offenders in some way.

My focus here is this small time trolling ("little t trolls"), in respect to specialized social groups, such as feminist spaces. More scholarship on little t trolling that I've found has been in relation to feminst-identified spaces online, but suggestive that the little t's behavior is common on other types of spaces/boards, specialized for race, ethnicity, sexualorientation, religion - pretty much any "inflammatory" topic.

Little T's are semi-protected under the idea of free speech, and certain libertarian principles that undergird the internet (Herring?), but the net as we know it has been around long enough to have some sort of ethical code or codes to counteract the little t impulses in many of us.

Example: comment space mod policies (Teh Portly Dyke, BoingBoing), Blogger Code of Conduct, disemvoweling, etc.

The idea of offering a comment space is dependent on an ethic of inclusiveness and even tolerance (to a point) - but having a comment space on an issue that tends to attract trolls and *not* having a mod policy/enforcing it produces an institutional passivity that some people may interpret as "asking for it".

This leads me into the frequent sexual nature of little (and even big) trolling, especially in feminist or woman-identified spaces online. The salacious undertones sell a lot of tut-tut articles, but it is a distrubing element. Sexual harassment is nothing new in real life or the internet, but its virulence online seems aimed at "constructing" any dissent or reaction on the part of the trolled as "censure" to free speech (Herring) and not a logical offense reaction any person woudl take to a volley of violently sexual insults.

(I don't really want to quote any examples - some are too awful - I'll just paraphrase them when I do the next draft)

This construction places a user (let's say a woman) in a bind - if she stands up to the troll, she may be cast as "hysterical" and 'trying to limit his right to free speech" - but a sexual-toned attack, even verbal, is certainly different than a male-to-male barb. (Eg, you don't have to threaten to rape someone to disagree, or even to insult them - even if you have no way or desire to actualyl pull it off). The bind this hypothetical woman is in requires her to either ignore it, jsut take it, or open herself to more attack if she fights back. Trolling a space in this manner uses age-old tactics of undermining a woman's opinion or statements to paint them as silly or overly dramatic, and therefore to be ignored. Not in keeping with the egalitarian ambitions of the internet, eh?

This is not limited to women, and of course not all woman-identified spaces online are feminst, and not all trolls are male. My point is this:

1 - the internet is more suffused than we really anticipated
2 - a hell of a lot more people are on it, people of all sorts of opinions, backgrounds, skills, etc
3 - ergo, women in general have increased access
4 - these net-accessing women often construct spaces to talk about things, sometimes very sensitive things, sometimes not
5 - trolling either has taken on a newer, more violent streak, or at least we hear about it more in "the media"*
6 - these aforementioned spaces (or spaces about religion, sexuality, etc) benefit from the technologies to further and refine their ideas and practices, but this very tech leaves them vulnerable to people that disagree
7 - there's somethign about the net that makes some people behave worse than they normally would.
8 - we are now in new territory because that worse behavior can do tangible harm. now what?

that harm can range from the mild (breaking up a discussion area that may be helping people deal with issues, expand their minds, exchange ideas, etc.) to actual real-life harassment (Sierra) and possibly contact.


*i've grown to loathe that phrase