This is why we can't have nice things: Mapping the relationship between online trolling and mainstream culture

Bollinger, Beth J.

doi:10.1111/jcom.12221

Cited by 53 publications

(97 citation statements)

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“…But memes often aren't just funny; memes are often lulzy, and that makes all the difference. Lulz, Whitney Phillips (2015) explains in her study of early 2000s internet trolls, is targeted laughter at another's expense, and it feeds off both identification and disidentification. Adeyemi Adegoju and Oluwabunmi Oyebode (2015) found as much in their study of memes circulated during Nigeria's 2015 presidential election; the memes worked through a mix of positive portrayals of ingroups and negative portrayals of outgroups.…”

Section: The Fragility Of Lulzmentioning

confidence: 99%

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On the Meme Train to Sylt: Memetic Becoming and Ambivalent Identification Online

Milner

Wolff

2023

Social Media + Society

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In June 2022, the German government implemented a transit policy offering travelers an unlimited ticket to ride the country’s regional train system all summer long for a mere 9€. Conservative pundits and commentators decried the policy, worrying that the rabble would use their 9€ tickets to overwhelm posh tourist destinations like the island of Sylt in the North of Germany. An overwhelming invasion never materialized, but a fair share of raucous punks did set up shop in Sylt’s public squares in the days after the ticket became available. Just as significant as the physical “invasion” of Sylt were the flurry of memes produced surrounding the Sylt controversy. Through memes, social media participants simultaneously mocked conservative worry about Sylt and punk presence on Sylt. All this memetic play inspired participants to become. Through a mix of identification and disidentification, memes hailed participants into political stances characterized by specific modes of expression. Sylt memery was lulzy, agonistic, and ephemeral. In other words, it was indicative of the broader ambivalence that characterizes public participation inflected by the internet culture. The Sylt story therefore holds lessons about the potentials and pitfalls of collective expression on social media. Memetic becoming, at best, can help people speak truth to power. At worst, it can inspire only a nihilistic smirk as the pixels speed across the screen.

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Section: The Fragility Of Lulzmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…But a threat also lingers in that safe ambiguity. Phillips andMilner (2017, 2021) have articulated the pitfalls of distant, ironic, lulzy laughter that gets its joy from the suffering of others. The pitfalls of being able to hide hatred, not empowerment, behind the "only joking" mask.…”

Section: The Fragility Of Lulzmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Meme Train to Sylt: Memetic Becoming and Ambivalent Identification Online

Milner

Wolff

2023

Social Media + Society

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“…This tone is defined by a schadenfreude of the most extreme kind and a rhetorical mayhem over which one will invariably struggle to gain critical purchase. Yet are terms like "the lulz" and "shitposting" used by contemporary critics like Seymour or Whitney Phillips (2015) not merely novel iterations of more inveterate discursive, rhetorical, and affective strategies? Are the "lulz", that which is supposed to ultimately motivate a troll's extreme cruelty, and which Phillips defines as "acute amusement in the face of someone else's distress, embarrassment, or rage" (57), not a contemporary version of the "rire carnassier" or "rire destructeur" (131) of which Roussin, mentioned earlier, has written?…”

Section: Le Rire Carnassiermentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Crowley,[99][100][101][102][103][104][105][106][107][108][109] See in particular: WhitneyPhillips (2015), This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture; Angela Nagle (2017), Kill All Normies: The Online Culture Wars from Tumblr and 4chan to the Alt-Right and Trump; Phillips and Ryan N. Milner (2017), The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity and Antagonism Online; Richard Seymour (2019), The Twittering Machine; chapters 8 and 9 of Justin Smith (2019), Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason; and Andrew Marantz (2020), Antisocial: How Online Extremists Broke America. 9 See Smith (2019): 230-237.…”

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confidence: 99%

Louis-Ferdinand Céline: Trolling For Another Time?

Warde

2021

dfs

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This article presents a reading of Louis-Ferdinand Céline through the concept of trolling. A relatively new phenomenon, trolling denotes an attempt to elicit a negative response in a chosen target via deliberate provocation or incitement. While inextricable from the online social media platforms that have facilitated its emergence as a discursive mode, trolling is dependent on rhetorical strategies that are hardly new: irony, self-referentiality, effrontery, aggression, etc. Trolls seek to cultivate a brand around the antipathy they delight in triggering. I contend that Céline attempted to do just this in the postwar period, and more specifically in the series of interviews he conducted at Meudon in the last decade of his life. I thus argue against some recent scholarship that claims that Céline attempted to regain, by expressing contrition, a sympathetic audience following his condemnation for having published a series of egregiously antisemitic pamphlets. Rather, I suggest that he sought to instrumentalize his notoriety for his own advantage; some readers, he likely reasoned, are drawn to him because, not in spite of, his infamy. My argument draws on a body of recent writing on the relationship between humour, new media and far-right politics.

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“…Shifman (2013, pp. 7-8) defines an Internet Meme as: ''(a) A group of digital items sharing common characteristics of content, form, and/or stance, (b) that were created with awareness of each other, and (c) were circulated, imitated, and/or transformed via the Internet by many users'' (see also Baym, 2015;Miller, 2020;Phillips, 2015;Stromer-Galley, 2019;Younes & Altakhaineh, 2022). According to Shifman (2013, p. 14), Internet Memes can be considered as ''modern folklore, in which shared norms and values are constructed through cultural artefacts such as photoshopped images.''…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Function of Metaphor Modality in Memes on Jordanian Facebook Pages

ElShami¹,

Shuaibi

Zibin

2023

Sage Open

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This study aims to examine the function of metaphor modality (monomodal and multimodal) in a corpus of 250 memes collected from two Jordanian-based Facebook pages called “مطب – Bump” and “فيل زهري – Feel Zahri [pink elephant].” The 250 memes were shared on these Facebook pages between January 2019 and January 2020. The study adopts Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) by Lakoff and Johnson and Forceville’s Multimodal Metaphor Theory (MMT) as its theoretical framework. The results showed that metaphors used in the target memes were conveyed through the use of common source domains, word-image incompatibility (to create irony and by extension humor), and intertextual links where the intertextual gap is minimized to facilitate understanding. The results also revealed that multimodal metaphors (containing both visual and verbal cues) are more frequent than monomodal metaphors (only visual cues or verbal cues) in the target memes, which could be ascribed to the fact that Jordanian creators of memes may want to achieve maximum contextual effects with minimum processing time. With regard to the nature of the metaphors found in terms of universality, the majority of the metaphors are potentially near universal (e.g., human behavior is animal behavior), yet it was argued that some of them pass through the cultural filter giving rise to specific mappings and, in turn, generating culture-specific metaphors.

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This is why we can't have nice things: Mapping the relationship between online trolling and mainstream culture

Cited by 53 publications

References 0 publications

On the Meme Train to Sylt: Memetic Becoming and Ambivalent Identification Online

On the Meme Train to Sylt: Memetic Becoming and Ambivalent Identification Online

Louis-Ferdinand Céline: Trolling For Another Time?

The Function of Metaphor Modality in Memes on Jordanian Facebook Pages

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