Exhaustive Survey of Rickrolling in Academic Literature

Abstract

Rickrolling is an Internet cultural phenomenon born in the mid 2000s. Originally confined to Internet fora, it has spread to other channels and media. In this paper, we hypothesize that rickrolling has reached the formal academic world. We design and conduct a systematic experiment to survey rickrolling in the academic literature. As of March 2022, there are 23 academic documents intentionally rickrolling the reader. Rickrolling happens in footnotes, code listings, references. We believe that rickrolling in academia proves inspiration and facetiousness, which is healthy for good science. This original research suggests areas of improvement for academic search engines and calls for more investigations about academic pranks and humor.Peer-reviewed, published in the proceedings of SIGBOVIK, 2022.

Comparing shades of darkness: trolling victims’ experiences on social media vs. online gaming

“…Examples of this could be purposely throwing one’s avatar into the enemy to give the enemy the benefits of a kill (often called ‘feeding’) or using one’s avatar to block the movement of a teammate (often called ‘body-blocking’). Although this kind of exploitation does occur outside of the gaming sphere – one can think of Rickrolling, in which a person is bait and switched on YouTube when they expect one type of video and is treated instead to the music video of Rick Astley’s 1987 hit “Never gonna give you up” ( Baudry and Monperrus, 2022 ) – it appears less frequently in extant literature. Instead, literature focusing on social media tends to focus on the verbal elements of trolling: misinformation and the weaponization of information ( Kargar and Rauchfleisch, 2019 ; Kirkwood et al, 2019 ), nasty comments on social media posts ( Lopes and Yu, 2017 ; Masui, 2019 ), or making inflammatory posts to provoke others ( Navarro-Carrillo et al, 2021 ).…”