Published: Wed 06 January 2016
By Joseph Reagle
In social .
tags: social comment
Since writing Reading the
Comments “bad
apple” idiom . The three sources of rottenness also, roughly, follow
the development of theories about online behavior. However, I believe
the temperature (media effects), state of the barrel (group culture),
and presence of worms (disordered personalities) are all still
relevant.
bad apple
When researchers first started talking about flaming back in the 90s,
they tended to focus on the effects of “Computer-Mediated
Communication ” (CMC). Researchers spoke of reduced social cues,
media richness, and social information processing; they offered theories
of hyperpersonal
media and of deindividuation
effects . When considering why people can be so rotten, I think these
media effects are related to the effect of temperature on apples. The
hotter it is, the faster the apples in a barrel will spoil. We can see
this when Lindy West’s cruelest
troll apologized: “it finally hit me. There is a living, breathing
human being who is reading this shit. I am attacking someone who never
harmed me in any way.” Interacting online had distanced him from the
consequences of his actions. Using digital communication can increase
the temperature and the likelihood of something rotten happening.
In the new millennium, these media effects were supplemented by a
focus on environment and culture. Watt, Lea, and Spears wrote that
“theoretical revisions have moved away from the central importance of
communication bandwidth.” They also argued that people still have
inhibitions and norms when online, people just look to more salient
norms. Trolling had become its own culture, with its own norms. As
Coleman wrote
in 2011: “trolls have transformed what were more occasional and sporadic
acts, often focused on virtual arguments called flaming or flame wars,
into a full-blown set of cultural norms and set of linguistic
practices.” In this light, someone like Violentacrez
didn’t become wholly uninhibited by norms; he was doing what had become
the norm in his corner of Reddit. Just as an apple in a rotting barrel
is likely to go bad, someone hanging out in a rotten subreddit is more
likely to do the same.
Finally, although folks have long been armchair-diagnosing others,
researchers are beginning to consider personality. Buckels, Trapnell,
and Paulhus found
measures of sadism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism are positively
correlated with trolling and that there was a strong relationship
between “online commenting frequency, trolling enjoyment, and trolling
behavior and identity.” Although I object to using the term “troll” to
label any undesirable behavior, I relate this to the worm that spoils an
apple. Maybe folks like Violentacrez and weev would test highly on
this “dark tetrad” of personality variables. At the extreme, I sometimes
reference Luka Magnotta, who was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia
in his teens. As I wrote in Reading the
Comments
All of these things, temperature, environment, and worms contribute
to a rotten barrel of apples. Similarly, media effects, culture, and the
disordered do the same online.
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