[Air-l] Doctorow on Dealing With Trolls

[Mary-Helen Ward]

A listserv is a voluntary community. It isn't like a school, or a church 
or a university class where people may feel community sanctions or even 
discipline if they don't attend and contribute. The mores, folkways, 
whatever you want to call them,  are easily intuited - you simply lurk 
on a list for a while to get a feeling for the kind of discourse that is 
acceptable there. Of course they are subjective - they are produced as 
the result of continuing interactions, and they aren't fixed either. We 
make them up as we go along, to a large extent, although there are often 
listowners or moderators who will have the last word. It's their list; 
they can decide.

But you can learn these boundaries if you want to. You can choose to 
live within them, you can choose to try and stretch them, or you can 
choose to violate them. All of these actions will have consequences for 
you in that community and yo can examine the consequenbces and decide 
how to proceed next. It's fluid and it cnages all te time. Like life, 
really.

A troll trolls - I'm not sure why using the word as a noun or a verb 
really changes the relationship between the troll and the list.

M-H


James Whyte wrote:

>Mary-Helen,
>   
>  I don't think anyone could disagree with the sentiment of what you say. However, I do question whether the use of mores here is appropriate. In my dictionary, "mores" are very strong norms and have severe sanctions. Such as murder, rape, stealing a car, or battery on another person. Whereas norms are  "folkways" and generally akin to socially situated expectations of behavior. Given this definition, I am trying to understand what example one would use as an example of  "mores" in a listserv.
>   
>  Since norms are rarely explicit then they remain an elusive construct and always subjective. Assigning the label of "Troll" to a person is the subjective evaluation of a behavior by the person that uses the term. Unlike "lurking", I doubt if there would be any dispute that the term is negative.
>   
>  It is not a stretch to see that if a person labels someone a "troll" they could very well be a troll themselves. In fact Wikipedia list such behavior as an action exhibited by known trolls.
>  IMHO, when a person encounters such an act of labeling they should be critics of the speaker as well as the actor.
>   
>  While Boring could not have contemplated the Internet or such Internet jargon, he was, in the full article, addressing the behaviors. As discussed in the thread on lurking, I suggest that Howard Becker (a sociologist) would not disagree with Boring. Labeling theory is a contemporary artifact of social Psychology.
>   
>  Finally, troll used as a verb has a very different outcome than using it noun. Doctorow consistantly uses it as a noun and it so doing reifies it.
>   
>  
>

-- 
Best wishes

Mary-Helen
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