The article singles out and describes the main rhetorical ingredients of trolling through contrasting it with comparable discursive practices: provocation, joke, defensive anonymity, critical public discourse, controversy and lie. The following elements are found to play a major role in the discursive construction of trolling: topic-insensitive provocation; time-boundless jest; sadistic hierarchy of sender and receiver; anonymity of both the troll and their audience; choral character of the “actant observer” of trolling; construction of artificial contradictory semantics; disruption of argumentative logics; irrelevance of the relation between beliefs and expressions. Trolling profoundly disrupts the conversational ethics of the human civilization because it severs expression from content, signifier from signified, and communication from intention. The article focuses on a specific case study: trolling in relation to the President of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, Ms Laura Boldrini.

The Art of Trolling: Semiotic Ingredients, Sociocultural Causes, Pragmatic and Political Effects

Massimo Leone
2018-01-01

Abstract

The article singles out and describes the main rhetorical ingredients of trolling through contrasting it with comparable discursive practices: provocation, joke, defensive anonymity, critical public discourse, controversy and lie. The following elements are found to play a major role in the discursive construction of trolling: topic-insensitive provocation; time-boundless jest; sadistic hierarchy of sender and receiver; anonymity of both the troll and their audience; choral character of the “actant observer” of trolling; construction of artificial contradictory semantics; disruption of argumentative logics; irrelevance of the relation between beliefs and expressions. Trolling profoundly disrupts the conversational ethics of the human civilization because it severs expression from content, signifier from signified, and communication from intention. The article focuses on a specific case study: trolling in relation to the President of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, Ms Laura Boldrini.
2018
Virality and Morphogenesis of Right-Wing Internet Populism
Peter Lang
Welt - Körper – Sprache: Perspektiven kultureller Wahrnehmungs- und Darstellungsformen
13
163
178
978-3-653-06457-5
https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/19007
Trolling, Anonymity, Digital Cultures, Semiotics
Massimo Leone
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/2318/1684863
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