Chapter Review of Why We Cant Have Nice Things
Whitney Phillips. This is Why We Tin can't Have Dainty Things: Mapping the Relationship Betwixt Online Trolling and Mainstream Civilization. MIT Printing, 2015. ISBN: 978-0262529877
The existence of trolls, or the practice of trolling, is something that many net users are likely familiar with through either firsthand feel, anecdotal accounts, or rhetoric in the news about how the trolls need to be stopped so we can have better interactions in online environments like social media platforms. In This is Why We Can't Accept Nice Things, Whitney Phillips questions the placement of trolls as malevolent outsiders who are ruining the internet for the rest of us (they are why we tin can't accept nice things online) and offers an alternative explanation based on interviews and participant observation. Phillips depicts how trolls take fed from, aligned with, and contributed to aspects of mainstream culture every bit we know information technology in the United States. Trolls and trolling are, in other words, a part of our civilization.
This is Why Nosotros Can't Take Nice Things presents an business relationship of the subcultural troll which argues that online trolls serve to highlight inconsistency and hypocrisy in society. While there is a history of trickster figures interim as a foil to club, what is unique near online trolls is that they exist in a very obvious cybernetic feedback loop with other aspects of mainstream culture. Trolls, Phillips argues, are embedded within and supported by the dominant institutions and tropes of club. Trolling then is not social deviance or even exceptional behavior, but part of the mainstream culture which it mocks. In her work Phillips is describing the unique identity of what she terms the "subcultural troll." These trolls had a ready of practices and places for community building which united them as a subcultural grouping and set them apart from other groups online. Subcultural trolls were engaged in what Phillips labeled "cultural digestion;" they scavenged, extracted, and exploited aspects of mainstream civilisation for their own purposes (i.e.' for the lulz) and in the procedure revealed the biases, hypocrisy, and inconsistencies inherent in order. Phillips' argument in This is Why Nosotros Can't Accept Prissy Things is that we confront the uncomfortable truth about trolls: they are just revealing and amplifying behaviors and attitudes that already be, and are even historic, in mainstream culture.
The overarching structure of Phillips work is temporal; the chapters are broken downwards into three sections that are associated with a period of time in the history of subcultural trolls. This history begins with a case for the historical antecedents and ancestors of trolls by outlining the functions of trickster figures in diverse cultures. This historical perspective is paired with a description of patterns of communication which began emerging during the formative years of the net- the period of proto-trolling. The subsequent capacity then trace the emergence, rise, and disintegration of the subcultural troll from the point of origin on the newly created 4chan in the early 2000s until its death by mainstream meme civilisation roughly a decade afterward.
The secondary structure follows the motivations and behaviors of subcultural trolls: capacity 1 and 2 describe trolls and their origins in the contemporary media mural, Phillips' conceptualization of a subcultural troll, and explains their underlying motivations (lulz); chapter iii outlines Phillips' methodology; chapters 4, v, and 6 explicate the cybernetic feedback loop that includes trolls and mainstream news and media outlets; chapter 7 delves deeper into the cultural logics of trolls; chapter 8 provides an account of the dissolution of the subcultural troll; chapter 9 ends the book with some consideration of the legacy of trolls and the continued do of trolling online and in mainstream civilisation.
One of the well-nigh interesting parts of This is Why Nosotros Tin't Have Nice Things is Phillips' description of her methods. Phillips conducted a qualitative, mixed methods study of trolls over a period of several years and engaged with a variety of different academic literatures, such every bit digital media studies, folklore studies, cultural studies, and feminist theory. Phillips interviewed twenty-5 self-identified trolls and conducted thousands of hours of participant observation on 4chan, Facebook, YouTube, Encyclopedia Dramatica, and Skype. But her methods department is not a simple account of how she conducted her participant observation or what she discussed with her interviewees. Phillips devotes much of her methodology chapter to discussing all of the complications (methodological, theoretical, and personal) which she worked through; in fact, Phillips insists that overcoming these challenges were an of import part of her piece of work. What is specially useful for those interested in doing like work, Phillips discusses the issue of dealing with a gear up of behaviors and practices that do not trace back to people where they live. The objects and subjects of her report existed divorced from concrete data such as demographics; trolls often favor anonymity. In the absence of more precise demographics, Phillips engaged in a process of constructing symbolic demographics using observations that could be vetted and verified. (Phillips relied on the work of Gabriella Coleman as a precedent)[1]. Phillips reflection on this process is useful for those interested in overcoming similar research limitations. Phillip's process of constructing symbolic demographics immune her to focus on the cultural pathology of trolls and demonstrate how their behaviors accept wide impacts beyond the level of the individual.
Phillips uses the term "subcultural trolling" to distinguish betwixt the highly stylized practices utilized past the group she was studying from other forms of antagonistic online behaviors that may be described as trolling. She also makes the choice to authorize this stylized trolling every bit "subcultural" in guild to assert that these behaviors are not removed from the capitalist social tropes and ideologies that make up the "mainstream," but are in fact part of the system. Subcultural trolls existed in a symbiotic relationship, which Phillips described as a cybernetic feedback loop, with the mainstream media who benefited from the activities of trolls who increased website traffic and advertising revenues while the trolls benefitted from access to easy lulz. Phillips presents several examples of the connection betwixt subcultural trolls and the mainstream media and how lulz resulted and were understood. Lulz, at its core, refers to the amusement derived from the distress of others. The affordances of social media platforms, particularly those which let anonymity, decontextualize both issues and people online and promote objectification, cocky-involvement, and emotional unattachment. The cultural logics of trolls, Phillips argues, are the logics of social networking technologies taken to extremes. Phillips illustrates how the pursuit of lulz was the basis for both social cohesion and social constraint amidst subcultural trolls past describing the three characteristics of lulz: fetishism, generation, and magnetism. Subcultural trolls pursued lulz equally a product to exist obtained regardless of the effects of the process, the achievement of lulz supported the pursuit of even more lulz, and lulz attracted an audience which sustained the interconnected network of practices for the lulz. Memes in particular became the lingua franca of the subcultural troll and united them every bit a group, according to Phillips. Nevertheless, the creation of meme generators allowed troll subculture to become visible, accessible, and marketable on a big calibration which weakened the cohesion of the subcultural troll identity. This dissolution was farther abetted by the splintering of subcultural trolls into two groups: those that continued the pursuit of lulz and those who began to encompass hacktivist ethics. Trolls no longer exist every bit they did in the time and places Phillips describes when she was amidst them. The subcultural trolls identified by Phillips have been set adrift by the very practices which made them unique.
This is Why We Can't Have Squeamish Things should be read past those interested in an ethnographic account of people and behaviors online who are often thought of as the worst on the internet that yet manages to explore and explicate these behaviors in ways that make them more intelligible and even understandable to outsiders. Phillips besides succeeds in illustrating the tension in mainstream culture between admiring trolls for some of their more humorous activities- such as memeing- while simultaneously condemning trolls for some of their more than unsafe practices- such equally doxing (publicizing individual and/or personal information online). Since This is Why We Can't Have Overnice Things, claiming to be a troll, or engaging in trolling, has become and then mutual that information technology is meaningless to identify as a troll- except to country a dearest of being antagonistic. Although it is no longer useful to discuss trolls equally a unique subculture, the observations made by Phillips about trolling, how it is enabled, and how it links to broader contexts are still relevant. Memes and antagonism remain visibly present online, but more than chiefly the tactics and logics of subcultural trolls have been instrumental in some of the most pregnant cultural moments of the by few years, like GamerGate[2] and the 2016 presidential ballot[3]. The subcultural troll may be gone, but many of the concepts within This is Why Nosotros Tin't Accept Nice Things are however relevant to considerations of the trolling practices which continue online and could be linked to discussions of technological entitlement, expansionist policies, and androcentrism online.
References
[1] Yaniga, A. Eastward. (2014, May 27). Review: Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking by Gabriella Coleman. Techno_ethno.
[2] Dewey, C. (2014, October 14). The only guide to Gamergate you will ever need to read. The Washington Mail.
[three] Cogan, Grand. (2016, December 21). How Net Trolls Gained Real Power and Won the Presidential Election. Esquire.
Source: https://sites.uci.edu/technoethno/2018/03/22/this-is-why-we-cant-have-nice-things/
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