Fembot Laundry Day
April 10, 2012 § Leave a Comment
Today the Fembot Collective published a collection of perspectives on trolling/online aggression. I was one of the contributors, and wrote a thing about some trollthings. Here’s a snippet from my entry (for some reason my name isn’t on the article just yet, though I’ve been told that will be fixed soon):
About a year ago, I wrote an essay about Dickwolves. Well, tried to write an essay about Dickwolves—about halfway into the project, I realized I was out of my league, or at least was working outside my jurisdiction. Because as trollish as some of the engagement might have been, a large percentage of the responses were clearly more than “simple” trolling. Scare quotes very much intended, as there’s nothing simple about trolling behaviors. But Dickwolves, especially the subsequent attacks against feminist bloggers, was something else, a hybrid mess of trolling and harassment. Despite this, I applied my analysis of the former to what I should have recognized as the latter, which was a mistake.
Even though the resulting essay was a failure, and a spectacular failure at that (hey, go big or go home), my misadventures with Dickwolves forced me to consider the difference(s) between trolling and other forms of online aggression, a distinction with major methodological—not to mention legal—implications.
For more, go to here.
