[Air-l] Doctorow on Dealing With Trolls

[James Whyte]

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.
   
  James

Mary-Helen Ward <mhward at usyd.edu.au> wrote:
  I would say that the boundary is evident when someone repeatedly 
transgresses the mores of a list. 
       
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