WISC - Warwick Institute for the Science of Cities - You Tube

Nate Tkacz has published an article in The Fibreculture Journal special issue on 'trolls and the negative space of the internet'. Abstract:

The warm and fuzzy rhetorics of network cultures–words like collaboration, participation and open communities–have always been made possible through acts of analytic metonymy. Once an ‘open community’ has been established, to take an example, deviations are all too often depicted as one-off exceptions, as problematic individuals bent on destroying the common spaces and creations of the well-meaning many. The figure of the troll and its modus operandi of ‘flaming’ are exemplary in this regard. The act of naming someone a troll, not only reaffirms the general ‘good faith’ of the rest of the community, but also transforms antagonism into a mere character flaw. In this article, I suggest the notion of the frame, read primarily through Bateson and Goffman, can be translated into online spaces in order to make visible the structural conditions that underpin forms of online antagonism. Drawing from “article deletion” discussions in Wikipedia, I show how the ascription of negative subjectivities–trolls, vandals, fundamentalists etc.– is the result of an a priori ‘frame politics’.