Trolls are like ghosts

On the one hand, trolling messages contribute no meaningful content, being merely tediously predictable responses to certain situations. But on the other hand they are designed to provoke a certain effect - to harass and intimidate.

@adriandaub makes the interesting suggestion that trolls are like ghosts (WTCT p96). Or perhaps automatons.

An aggrieved white guy who has set up an alert for when Sarah Jeong tweets and then huddles over his phone to make some claim about racism and Roseanne using jagged grammar and vertiginous logic is functionally indistinguishable from a bot having been set up to do the same thing.

WTCT p94

Although he complains that practitioners of NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) take the notion of programming literally (WTCT pp 144-5), the automatic response described by Professor Daub seems to involve a form of conditioning that might be regarded as functionally indistinguishable from programming. (As a computer scientist myself, it is not for me to argue with a professor of literature whether it is the practitioners of NLP or its critics who take the notion of programming literally.)

As I think I've stated elsewhere, I regard NLP as a syncretic collection of interesting ideas (strongly influenced by Bateson and others) and dubious snakeoil. Although the snakeoil elements are generally regarded as pseudoscience, I wouldn't want to lose the ideas. Daub mentions two important ones, which Bandler and Grinder didn't invent but did much to popularize - reframing and feedback.

In communication there are no mistakes - everything is feedback

WTCT p 145

Many years ago, I invoked a similar idea (the meaning of a communication is its effect) in a discussion on the signal/noise ratio with the blogger Ernie the Attorney, who had complained that What we have here is a failure to communicate.

In his chapter on Communication, drawing on earlier theorists including John Durham Peters, Daub argues not only that communication often falls short of its potential, but sometimes occupies a space of preordained, deliberately engineered disappointment (WTCT p 89). It's as if the troll actively wants to be misunderstood.

Or even to cease to be a subject. Daub mentions Sontag's interpretation of Freud: human aggression frequently flows from an unconscious desire to become inanimate (WTCT p95).

As I pointed out in an earlier post (November 2018), many of the speech acts that pollute the internet are not propositions but other rhetorical gestures. And even if the trolling message appears to be coded as a proposition, the metacommunication is otherwise. In his 2019 article for Logic Magazine, Peters notes that the aim of trolling is to goad someone else into getting upset, an act known as triggering, and describes the outgoing US president as an absolute master at metacommunicative messing. And of course framing/reframing.

Furthermore, the troll's targets often include the medium itself, as the cultural theorist Mark Fisher once observed.

The elementary Troll gesture is the disavowal of cyberspace itself. In a typical gesture of flailing impotence that nevertheless has effects — of energy-drain and demoralisation — the Troll spends a great deal of time on the web saying how debased, how unsophisticated, the web is.

Andrew Iliadis explains the information theory of Gilbert Simondon in terms that can be linked to the notion of reframing: 

Information is that that which, depending on the way that it comes into contact with another abstraction of itself, unlocks or clicks into another form of reality.

Reality, fiction functioning as truth, or just lulz?

To be a game, the participants have to agree on the frame that this is play. The anthropologist Gregory Bateson once made this point brilliantly. Hazing rituals, he said, were governed by the frame is this play? Trolls like to claim the prerogative to define an interaction as play when their conduct makes that frame completely unclear.

Peters 2019

 

The play's the thing, someone once suggested, wherein to catch the conscience of the King. But what if the king has no conscience, no soul?

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Rachel Barney [Aristotle], On Trolling (Journal of the American Philosophical Association 2 (2):193-195, 2016)

Adrian Daub, What Tech Calls Thinking (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2020) 

Mark Fisher, Fans, Vampires, Trolls, Masters (k-punk, 12 June 2009) 

Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Boston: Northeastern Press, 1974)

Andrew Iliadis, A New Individuation: Deleuze's Simondon Connection (MediaTropes Vol IV, No 1, 2013)

John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air (Chicago University Press, 1999) 

John Durham Peters, U-Mad (Logic Issue 6, 1 January 2019)

Susan Sontag, Fascinating Fascism (New York Review of Books, 6 February 1975)

Related posts: Failure to Communicate (July 2004), Good Ideas from Flaky Sources (December 2009), Ethical Communication in a Digital Age (November 2018), Can predictions create their own reality (August 2021)

The Purpose of Ritual

@ColinBeveridge asks about the purpose of the introduction ritual at the start of many meetings, and suggests that Going Around The Table Is A Waste Of Time.

"So-called ‘face time’ is increasingly precious to all of us, which makes me wonder why we routinely waste so much time, at the beginning of meetings, by ‘going round the table’ to introduce ourselves to each other."

I was at a meeting this week where the introductions lasted almost until lunchtime, and one of the attendees had to leave before the introductions had finished. But in terms of the purpose of that particular meeting, long introductions seemed both necessary and useful.

In other meetings, especially where most of the people already know each other, the introductions are often skimped or omitted altogether. A bit of perfunctory small-talk and then down to business. From an ultra-rationalist perspective, this style might seem more efficient.

But what if systematically encouraging all the participants to exercise their voice-box and social manners before tackling the main business of the meeting resulted in a more effective discussion, to which the quieter and more thoughtful participants made a more significant contribution? Would Colin still think that the ritual was a waste of time?

Watching the Australian Open on the television this week, it occurred to me that the introductions at the start of many business meetings served a similar purpose to the warm-up before a tennis match - helping the players to shake off the stress of waiting for the match to start, and also get used to the conditions of the court, before starting to compete in earnest.

If going around the table is really a waste of time, as Colin thinks, why do so many meetings do this? There must be some positive social effect that explains why people maintain this ritual. POSIWID - the purpose of a system is what it does.

Signalling Terrorism

From the @NewYorker, Steve Coll on how the U.S. talks about terrorists - this is a brief review of “U.S. Counter-Terrorism Strategy and al-Qaeda: Signaling and the Terrorist World-View,” by Joshua Alexander Geltzer.

According to Geltzer, Cheney believed that Al Qaeda attacks had been encouraged by "provocative weakness" - ambiguous signals from previous administrations, not just Clinton, but going back to Reagan - and was determined to send tough signals to Al Qaeda.

But in Geltzer's opinion, the audience that would be most responsive to these signals would be an audience of people who thought like Cheney himself. "The audience that appears to have been in the minds of American policymakers as they crafted their counter-terrorist signals was one akin to America as audience."

Steve Coll comments that "as a rhetorical tour de force ... this is a little too neat to be completely convincing". However, "as a breath-catching take on the problem of unexamined, ineffective, domestic-driven American signaling to terrorists, whether of the nascent Obama or entrenched Cheney type, Geltzer’s work is very impressive".

Real Audience

In the previous post Disaster in Iraq, I mentioned an interview Tony Blair gave to David Frost on al-Jazeera. Frost suggested that the intervention in Iraq was a disaster, and Blair responded with two words ("it has") before proceeding to explain the difficulties.

A public figure such as Tony Blair is always speaking to more than one audience, and his words may have a different effect for each audience. Was he speaking to the Middle East, to the Americans, to the UK Labour Party, to future historians? Or was the apparent assent ("it has") merely courtesy to an elderly interviewer?

Even experienced public figures fall foul of this problem occasionally. For example, UK Industry Minister Margaret Hodge made some remarks critical of Tony Blair at a private dinner; these remarks were later reported by the press [BBC News]. And when the Pope quoted some anti-Moslem sentiments in the middle of an academic lecture, these were repeated around the world. (See my earlier posts: Papa Ratzi 3, 4, 5.)

Good communicators adjust their language and emphasis to suit the audience. For a given audience, it may be possible to be sincere, authentic, grounded in the here-and-now. But this becomes increasingly difficult when communications intended for one audience are inevitably revealed/released to other audiences. Obviously Tony Blair cannot say one thing to al-Jazeera and something else to CNN without being found out. Even a perceived difference in tone will attract comment. Thus extreme publicness undermines authentic communication.

If a communication has diverse effects, how shall we determine the underlying purpose of the communication? Who is the real audience?

Failure to Communicate (Ernie the Attorney)

I have just stumbled across a great blog by Ernie the Attorney. 

In a post entitled What've got here is a failure to communicate, he discusses the signal/noise ratio in email and blogging. 

As we all know, apparent failure to communicate is a very common pattern of social interaction. Sometimes the POSIWID principle starts to look like the only explanation - the purpose of a communication is the effect it produces. Followers of Bateson (including the founders of NLP) sometimes make a related claim: the meaning of a communication is its effect. For example, although there are many blogs that contain good material (including Ernie's), it sometimes seems as if the various sociotechnical amplifiers that we use to link blogs together are only designed to produce noise. That's a great pity. 

 

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Update: Ernie now has four posts on communication failure.

• What we've got here is a failure to communicate (July 2004) 
• What we have here is an inability to communicate (October 2005)
  
• Failure to communicate (January 2009)
• What we (usually) have is a failure to communicate (May 2010)
  

My related posts

• Wifi in New Orleans - Katrina (October 2005)