Conceptos fundamentales del PAI

As some scholars have pointed out (Jane, What Flaming? 66; McCosker 204), the international debate on online harassment has been largely conducted – both in academia and in the media – through the use of the terms trolling and flaming.18 _{In fact, along with the growing}

pervasiveness of Web 2.0, disruptive conducts have become more and more common online and the words troll and flame themselves have turned into catch-all terms for many different negative online behaviours.19 _{Given the widespread use of such expressions, here I provide a}

deeper analysis of their etymological origin, which I consider necessary for a better understanding of their connection with online hate speech.

Flaming

The origin of the term flaming is quite uncertain. Nonetheless, scholars tend to follow Guy Steele et al. in tracking its origin back to early hackers’ communities on the Web to describe a way of speaking “rabidly or incessantly on an uninteresting topic or with a patently ridiculous attitude” (The Hacker’s Dictionary 158). Through the decades, this behaviour has attracted the

18 _{For clarity, following Hardaker (Trolling, 239), I distinguish between troller/flamer (a person sending a}

negative, disruptive message), troll/flame (the message itself) and trolling/flaming (the act of posting such message), even if this distinction is often absent from several definitions which are quoted in this chapter.

19 _{See Hardaker for a similar consideration on the use of trolling as “a catch-all term for any number of negatively}

attention of scholars working in the CMC field, who have used this term to refer to different forms of uninhibited online communication. Thus, definitions of flaming have ranged from “the expression of strong and inflammatory opinions” (Siegel et al. 161) and “expressing oneself more strongly on the computer than one would in other communication settings” (Kiesler et al. 1130), to any kind of emotional expression toward someone else which relies on the use of superlatives (Lea et al. 99). In a more recent contribution aimed at studying communication styles on the video-sharing website YouTube, Peter Moor et al. define flaming as a behaviour “displaying hostility by insulting, swearing or using otherwise offensive language” (1536). This last definition seems to be more realistically up-to-date when contextualised into the spread of online harassing discourses that we witness nowadays. It also shows how, in this meaning, flaming can stand as a synonym for hate speech as they both refer to the same broad abusive phenomenon, and thus some scholarly publications on flaming can help in tracing research on online hate speech throughout a period during which Web 2.0 transformed contemporary societies – i.e., from the late 1980s until today.

Trolling

Conversely, literature making use of the word trolling has not yet provided a working definition for it which clearly encompasses all behaviours and discourses typically found in hate speech. In fact, tracking the origin and the development of the use of trolling is far more difficult than for the case of flaming. First, it is very hard to pinpoint when it entered the online context. According to Mattathias Schwartz, Internet users started to adopt it in the late 1980s, while the Oxford English Dictionary reports a first use of the word only in 1992 (Oxford English Dictionary, Troll n.1).

In spite of its relatively recent online appearance, the origin of this word probably dates back to the 17th _{century; from the Scandinavian myth, it originally indicated giants, dwarfs,}

(Oxford English Dictionary, Troll n.2) and haunted the Vikings (Marche). According to the just-mentioned sources this is where the online use of the world originated, while others (Herring et al. 372; Binns 549) claim that it derives from the fishing technique in which fish is baited by dragging a lure through the water.

One of the first definitions of online troll appeared in 1994 in the Free On-Line Dictionary Of Computing (henceforth FOLDOC). FOLDOC described troll as “an electronic mail message, Usenet posting, or other (electronic) communication which is intentionally incorrect, but not overtly controversial.” Since the 1990s trolling has increased its presence in CMC, entering both the debate on online behaviours and dictionaries. Thus nowadays, definitions of troll can be found in most of contemporary English dictionaries. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in computing slang, a troll(er) is “a person who posts deliberately erroneous or antagonistic messages to a newsgroup or similar forum with the intention of eliciting a hostile or corrective response” (Oxford English Dictionary, Troll n.1). Similarly, the Macquarie Dictionary states that a troll(er) is “someone who, protected by online anonymity, posts messages in a discussion forum, chat room, etc., which are designed to disrupt the normal flow of communication by being inflammatory or puzzling” (Macquarie Dictionary, Troll).

Over the last two decades, scholars have been trying to describe the phenomenon of trolling from different perspectives, elaborating definitions that are sometimes in contrast among each other. In 1999, studying online trolling behaviour and its effects, Judith Donath pointed out that “trolling is a game about identity deception, albeit one that is played without the consent of most of the players. The troll attempts to pass as a legitimate participant, sharing the group’s common interests and concerns” (45). Meanwhile, other researchers have attempted to give a working definition of trolling, describing the nature, aims, and effects of this deceptive behaviour in cyberspaces. Some scholars have stressed the annoying nature of

trolling. For instance, Susan Herring et al. define it as an act aimed at luring others into useless circular discussion and describe a troller as someone who wants to interfere with the positive exchange of ideas in a given environment (e.g., a feminist online forum), shifting the dialogue into a confusing and fruitless conversation (Herring et al. 372). Some others have depicted it as the act of posting “incendiary comments with the express purpose of provoking an argument” (Cox). In more general and inclusive terms, trolling has been defined as an act resulting in the intentional disruption of useful online discussions through meaningless posts enjoying the resulting disharmony and conflict (Naraine).

Although all the above-mentioned definitions of trolling unveil important aspects of this disruptive online behaviour, they are not comprehensive of all the vicious features of online hate speech on social networks. For this reason, the widespread use of this term to refer to online harassment has been highly criticized by the American feminist activists Anita Sarkesiaan and Zoe Quinn, both harassed for several years by so-called online trollers.20 _When

asked about their experiences, they both denounced the dangerous sociocultural effects of confusing hate speech with trolling, bearing in mind the playful undertone highlighted by much trolling-related literature in the media and in scholarly research (see Sarkeesian, Stop; Quinn in Jason). During the sixth annual summit Women in the World organized by the New York Times, Sarkeesian affirmed that in her opinion the use of the word trolling is highly problematic, because “it reinforces the juvenile of all this [phenomenon]” and that, along with comments like “don’t feed the trolls,” “it’s just boys being boys,” and “it’s just the Internet,” it works “to make online harassment look normal” (Stop). Similarly, Quinn stated in a recent interview: “These aren’t troll[er]s. And it’s not online bullying. . . . These are people stalking, sending death threats, trying to get the cops to raid homes. These are criminals” (Quinn in

Jason). I want here to suggest that even though I agree with Sarkeesian and Quinn in stressing the problematic use of trolling with reference to online harassment, the widespread implementation of troll-related terms in contemporary journalism makes it impossible to analyse hate speech without relying on these words, and that, in order to use this word properly, a new working definition of it is necessary. As Claire Hardaker wrote in The Guardian:

[there is a] lack of agreement over what the word troll means. It is being used to describe everything from playground insults, sick jokes, and deliberate insensitivity right through to threats of violence, rape and murder. . . . If we are to take the meaning of trolling to include everything from the merely irritating to the clearly illegal, then this definitional issue will only become more important as more cases are prosecuted. (Young Men)

As she notes, there is a pressing need to face this definitional and conceptual issue if we want to keep using trolling-related vocabularies to refer to contemporary online abusive misbehaviours, because the increasing trend of framing online misogynistic harassment through trolling shows the necessity to develop an updated and more inclusive definition of this term. For this reason, I suggest here a new academic definition of trolling which makes it possible to use the word with reference to hate speech: trolling is a CMC phenomenon which can take many forms and can result in a wide range of disruptive conducts. While in its mildest types, trolling can be interpreted as an annoying mockery among online users, in its most severe forms it consists in the harassment of others, with the ultimate goal to silence and subjugate them and, therefore, to reaffirm one’s supremacy.

This new definition shows that trolling should be understood as a continuum of behaviours ranging from a type of bothersome – but rather innocuous – jest to a hostile stratagem suitable for maintaining social power asymmetries through online aggressive

conducts. Moreover, it underlines the importance of considering these more serious types of trolling as a device aimed at exercising control over disadvantaged groups, especially those who have historically challenged the unequal distribution of power within society. In these cases, trollers tend to justify – sometimes unconsciously – their behaviour as a legitimate “retaliation against a community that they feel has stripped away their identity and alienated them” (Suler and Phillips 277). Furthermore, mainstream gendered discourse tends to convey to many men a feeling of entitlement in a given sphere that is perceived as an exclusively male domain (Katz, Trolls); when individuals who have been traditionally excluded from the active participation in these spaces criticise the sociocultural mechanisms that regulate such spheres, they easily become target of aggressive trolling with severe consequences in their private lives on multiple levels, as I demonstrate by developing a new taxonomy of the material effects of online misogyny in Chapter 3, and by applying it in the analysis of my case studies. For this reason, thanks to my new definition, in the remainder of my thesis, terms like troll, troller, and

trolling are used sometimes to explain and analyse different cases of hate speech.