There has always been nastiness on the internet in my observation, since well before there was a world wide web. One of my first internet experiences involved some friends and I mildly lashing out at an individual on the other side of the world by way of a bulletin board system. The motivation, as far as I recall, was simply to annoy the target, and to elicit a reaction. This led to some trouble for the chap whose university-based credentials we were using – back then the internet was essentially an academic game reserve, far smaller and far more restricted in its user base. This was trolling in the more traditional sense of the word – deliberately trying to provoke an angry response for the purposes of entertainment – not the straightforward abuse that the media have called by that name in the last week or two, all in the course of unfurling what is now clearly recognisable as a moral panic.
The term “moral panic” denotes a peculiarly modern confluence of mass mediated anxiety, social deviance and state authority which periodically sweeps contemporary western cultures. What we’re witnessing now has many of the features that sociologists noted in coining the term in the 1970s. In 1972 Stanley Cohen had already named as “folk devils” those individuals, groups or things at the centre of panics, who were defined as presenting an existential threat to the social order. “Moral entrepreneurs” were the folk who mobilised the media and the people at large in the defence of allegedly threatened moral values. Back in the 70s politicians and community-based crusaders usually filled this position. Disproportionate coverage and social reaction often wound us up with changed laws or increased police powers. Cohen pointed out that it’s hard to stand up to a panic in full swing because the anxieties often revolve around taboo matters – who’d want to be seen to support violence against order, or deviance against agreed values?
While Cohen adduced his evidence from the media’s treatment of subcultural violence between the mods and rockers at the British seaside, later in the decade, Stuart Hall and his colleagues at the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies considered the racially-coded panic around the crime of mugging. They explained mugging panic by showing how the state solved broader problems of governance opportunistically, using moral panics to generate consent among the governed to extend state power. Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda boiled the mechanism underpinning moral panics into five simple steps. Moral panics featured concern about someone or something deemed likely to have a negative impact on society; hostility to that someone or something – enough to turn them into folk devils; the development of a consensus driven by the media and moral entrepreneurs that the folk devils in question do represent a problem; action being taken which was disproportionate to the threat, and volatility, which describes the aptness with which panics are likely to disappear or change in focus.
In the present case we can see that concern about trolls has been activated, hostility has been activated, a consensus is being worked on, and disproportionate censorship is being opportunistically threatened, or offered, by those in authority. In this case, though, in a glorious coincidence, the moral entrepreneurs and the journalists appear to be one and the same – no one has expressed more concern about the alleged nastiness online than the professional journalists writing articles and blog posts about it.
Later versions of moral panic theory can clarify this. In the 1990s, some noticed that panics could just as easily resolve on a technology, or particular practices of using a technology, as they could on outsider individuals or groups. Kirsten Drotner talked about “media panics” emerging along with new technologies; John Springhall showed how there had been a series of these stretching in an unbroken line back to the 1830s – the very beginnings of urban, industrial modern life. The common element in each case was a new technology that empowered young people from subordinate classes and/or devalued older more established cultural skills and literacies. The panic about “penny gaffs” in 19th century London was really about young working class men conspicuously and publicly consuming forms of leisure that raised the spectre of the urban mob and its demand for democracy. The problem with “penny dreadfuls” was really that working class people were visibly becoming a literate reading public, and bringing about the commercial success of a style of public discourse that was mobilising, but which ran counter to middle class values and interests. As different social classes came face to face in the new urban milieu, and as the value of established cultural capital declined relative to the value of new literacies tied up with new media technologies, conflicts over cultural value and cultural morality were bound to follow. It’s no surprise to find journalists, in particular, becoming anxious about technologies and practices that threaten a diminishment of their skills, and their role.
Negative behaviour and speech predates the online world. Conflict is as old as politics, as basic as disagreement, as familiar as scarcity or our language or the city in which we live. But it has also been evident, been worried about and been the subject of outrage in every iteration of internet technology. On bulletin boards, then newsgroups and email lists, then in MUDs and MOOs, then on blogs, then on gaming servers, then on social news sites, then on wikis, then on YouTube threads, then on social media, users – people – have found ways to annoy, abuse, irritate and offend other users. There’s nothing new in people being foolish, insulting, or deliberately disruptive online. I have not stopped talking about it with other users for 15 years or more. There is an elaborate and well-established set of manners, customs and vocabulary around such behaviour that users come to understand, contribute to, and modify. At the edges there is even awareness that conflict is actually generative and productive, and that extreme incivility is no more than systemic noise, not to be taken too seriously or personally. What then is new?
I do not want to minimise the hurt felt by people involved in recent prominent instances of online abuse, or discount the extended discussion of the gendered aspects of such conflicts. But I think trolling has suddenly become a national emergency in the last week or two because it is happening to celebrities, at a time when the mass uptake of social media platforms is coinciding with a sudden acceleration in the decline of Australia’s traditional media. Charlotte Dawson and Robbie Farah have had horrible things said to them in the last few days, which I’d never condone. But equally bad things have been said over the years in emails from the fans of right wing commentators, between bloggers in the middle of the last decade as inter-blog conflict raged out of control, or in the long and unedifying strings of discussion we sometimes find beneath YouTube videos. It’s true that this troll panic is an international phenomenon – in Britain we’ve seen successful prosecutions on the basis of nasty things people have said on social media. But that’s just because the conditions underlying our moral panic are global trends that work themselves out in different places in slightly different rhythms.
What’s called trolling has blown up into a media anxiety because it is a living reminder of the way in which technology has reduced journalists’ capacity for controlling the parameters of public debate. It’s also a reminder of the way in which celebrities, who are encouraged to use social media to take control of their “brand”, were once safe behind screens, but now, suddenly, have to make a moment by moment calculation about the risks and opportunities of conversation with ordinary people. For those beyond the media world who are anxious about the perils of online interaction, there is perhaps a concern over the erosion of the certainties of face to face talk and community, and the mores governing friendship and interaction. Underlying it all is the fact that none of us know where the ongoing cascade of changes involved with the internet – where whole industries have disappeared and fractious, unpredictable communities have arisen in their place – is taking us.
Image by *n3wjack via Creative Commons Licence
