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Flaming? What flaming? The pitfalls and potentials of researching online hostility

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Abstract

This article identifies several critical problems with the last 30 years of research into hostile communication on the internet and offers suggestions about how scholars might address these problems and better respond to an emergent and increasingly dominant form of online discourse which I call ‘e-bile’. Although e-bile is new in terms of its prevalence, rhetorical noxiousness, and stark misogyny, prototypes of this discourse—most commonly referred to as ‘flaming’—have always circulated on the internet, and, as such, have been discussed by scholars from a range of disciplines. Nevertheless, my review of this vast body of literature reveals that online hostility has historically posed a number of conceptual, methodological, and epistemological challenges due to which scholars have typically underplayed, overlooked, ignored, or otherwise marginalised its prevalence and serious ethical and material ramifications. Fortunately, lessons learned from my analysis suggests promising approaches for future research into this challenging form of new media discourse.

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Notes

  1. The term ‘Twitter trolling’ is used to refer to people who use the micro-blogging platform Twitter to send hostile messages.

  2. The focus on sexualised vitriol targeting women in this paper reflects: a) my initial research findings that this sort of gendered cyberhate has been one of the fastest growing types of e-bile in the past 4 years; and b) the fact that—while there does exist a great deal of e-bile that is racist and/or homophobic, and/or which targets men, these other types of e-bile still tend to be couched in the rhetoric of sexualized violence, and often involve antagonism towards females connected with male targets (cf.: Jane 2012b, 5–6; Jane 2014b, 565). While an investigation into the reasons for the misogynistic nature of much contemporary e-bile is beyond the scope of this paper, it would make an excellent avenue for future research.

  3. As McCosker notes, the terms ‘trolling’ or ‘hating’ have now become more common than ‘flaming’ in the context of social media sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter (2013, 5).

  4. I have undertaken a multi- rather than mono-disciplinary review to reflect the fact that members of internet research communities generally avoid describing the emergent and rapidly changing field of internet studies as being a discipline. Rather, this loose group of scholars favour defining it as an ‘interdisciplinary’ or ‘multidisciplinary’ field, ‘particularly in light of its fragmentation across so many existing departments, disciplines, and newly formed journals’ (Dutton 2013b, 8). Similarly, my literature review in this paper is diachronic rather than synchronic. I adopted this approach partly to offer a wide-angled view of scholarship in this area, but also to show the way that temporal contexts have been overlooked or flattened in this area’s extant scholarship. (I acknowledge, of course, that the latter approach risks replicating the same problem myself).

  5. Given the enormous difficulty—if not the outright impossibility—of separating ‘discourse’ from ‘acts’ in social and online media contexts, I note that the distinction here is primarily one of emphasis, in that my focus is on the discursive elements involved in various acts of online engagement.

  6. Indeed, ‘online uninhibited behavior’ is often used interchangeably with flaming (Kayany 1998, 1135).

  7. The contrast here between ‘absence’ and ‘presence’ is one of the most basic axes of phenomenological inquiry. A phenomenal presence can present itself (i.e. be present) via phenomenal absence. For instance—to use a banal example—a child’s tooth that has just fallen out is not felt as ‘nothing’. Equally, a person who is talking and then runs out of a room is not simply ‘absent’; given the context, their absence becomes a (somewhat uncomfortable) presence. On presence and absence, cf.: Derrida 1973; Merleau-Ponty 1968; and Sokolowksi (1978).

  8. Cf.: Evans (2011), Penny (2011), Gale cited in Jackman (2011), Tankard Reist cited in Jackman (2011), Smith (2011), Lewis-Hasteley (2011).

  9. A derivation of ‘LOL’ or ‘laugh out loud’, ‘lulz’ is a term from troll sub-cultures which refers to the ‘joy of disrupting another’s emotional equilibrium’ (Schwartz 2008).

  10. This is the phrase O’Sullivan and Flanagin use in relation to flaming (2003, 80).

  11. Talitha Stone, the young Australian woman at the centre of this case, received a torrent of Tweeted abuse from fans of American rapper Tyler, the Creator, after she criticised the rapper’s pro-rape lyrics (2013a). Her change.org petition—launched to pressure Twitter into improve its responses to reporting online abuse—garnered 140,433 electronic signatures, and is credited as one of the reasons the micro-blogging platform introduced a new ‘report abuse’ button in August 2013 (Stone 2013b).

  12. As Lea et al. observe, surely choosing symbols to replace an expletive exhibits at least a degree of inhibition (1992, 95).

  13. This is a reference to the ‘Dr. Ski’ research cited earlier (Thompsen and Foulger 1996).

  14. Cf.: Elliott (2011), Doyle (2011b), multiple comments on Doyle (2011b), Penny (2011), Lewis-Hasteley (2011), Jackman (2011), Smith (2011), multiple comments on Smith (2011), Penny (2013), and Criado-Perez (2013).

  15. The moral panic model—from cultural and media studies—is the idea that agents and institutions of control, including the media, exaggerate and amplify forms of deviance in order to justify the control of those portrayed as ‘deviant’ (Cohen 2002).

  16. An example of RIP trolling was the 2011 publishing of messages such as ‘Help me, mummy. It’s hot in hell’ on the Facebook page of a dead 14-year-old girl from the UK (Carey 2011).

  17. ‘The medium is the message’ is the phrase Marshall McLuhan used to describe his idea that the form of a medium embeds itself in the message, that ‘it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action’ (McLuhan 1994, 9).

  18. ‘You are a jerk’ is one of the ‘impolite statements’ Kiesler et al. code as uninhibited social behaviour in CMC (1985, 89).

  19. ‘Flash mob’, here, refers to the quasi-spontaneous crowd performance of a traditional Maori war cry or challenge (McCosker 2013, 2).

  20. Here I acknowledge that there are several scholars who figure flaming—and similar communications—as serious problems with serious consequences—cf.: Herring (2002), Herring et al. (2002), Lanier (2011), Hlavach and Freivogel (2011). After their survey of flaming-related literature, Moor et al. also argue (as this paper does) that: ‘Instead of ignoring flaming because it is such a difficult concept, it can be argued that it is a very real phenomenon that is worthy of more extensive research’ (Moor et al. 2010). The ethical ramifications of online hostility are, however, far more likely to be included in the ambit of research projects when academic authors designate it as something other than flaming. In cyber-bullying and cyber-stalking literature, for example, it is more common to find framings of online discourse as being a legitimate problem with serious ethical and material implications.

  21. According to US Bureau of Justice Statistics, the vast majority of violent sex offending is perpetuated by men against women, with an estimated 91 per cent of victims being female (Greenfeld 1997, 2). Nearly 99 % of the offenders described in single-victim incidents were male (ibid).

  22. The drawbacks of such approaches are noted by Lea et al. who argue that multiple references to flaming in scholarly texts—used to claim that such discourse proliferates and is universal in CMC—are based on only ‘a handful of data sources’ (1992, 96, 91). Yet these researchers then do something similar by using this same limited quantity of data to conclude the opposite: that flaming is relatively rare in CMC (96–7). To be fair to Lea et al., I note that they do ultimately survey additional material to support this contention. Initially, however, they reach this conclusion via ‘re-analyses’ of the limited number of extant reports (96).

  23. While ‘MUD’ once stood for ‘multi-user dungeon’, Lange uses the later variant of ‘multi-user dimension’ (2006).

  24. The notion of a ‘monothetic class’ goes back at least to Aristotle’s logic, although Aristotle simply uses the term ‘categories’ [Κατηγορίαι/Katēgoriai] (Aristotle 1984). One of the first employments of the term ‘monothetic set’ is by Morton Beckner in The Biological Way of Thought (Beckner 1959).

  25. A search using the ‘Google Scholar’ search engine on 27 December 2013 returned the result that this chapter had been cited on 439 occasions (see: http://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?q=%22%27Flaming%27+in+computer-mediated+communication%22&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5).

  26. Consider, as one of many similar examples, Martin Tanis’ reliance on that chapter—alongside other work from the 1990s—to conclude, in The Oxford Handbook of Internet Psychology in 2007—that ‘meta-analyses and literature reviews suggest that it is probably not as prevalent as often assumed’ (2007, 148). There is also Douglas’ 2008 citation of the chapter by Lea et al. to conclude that ‘although observations of flaming are common, research suggests that in absolute terms, flaming occurs infrequently and depends more on the context of the communication’ (2008, 202).

  27. Cf.: Reinig et al. (1997/1998), Landry (2000), Aiken and Waller (2000), Alonzo and Aiken (2004), Reinig and Mejias (2004), Johnson et al. (2008).

  28. Here I would like to note that I submitted an earlier iteration of this paper to The Fibreculture Journal in response to the cited COP. It was deemed not suitable for publication. I include this fact not for the purposes of staking the claim that the paper was rejected because of the pro-flaming bias discussed in the present paper, but simply to acknowledge that I have a personal history with this particular publication. Certainly I acknowledge that some of the criticisms made by the anonymous reviewers for this edition were valid and of great assistance in redrafting this essay.

  29. Here we are reminded of Richard MacKinnon’s argument that avoiding rape online is simply a matter of removing the ‘sex’ from sexual assault by decoding or recoding the anatomy involved. Like O’Sullivan and Flanagin, he also makes a case for the importation of his ideas into off-line contexts. Virtual reality, MacKinnon claims, ‘has served as a useful tool for re-evaluating rape as a historically mutable construction capable of positive- or re-construction’ (2006). The trick, he says, is simply to recode penises, anuses and vaginas so that that victims of sexual assault become victims of assault only, thereby experiencing ‘little if any social repercussions’ (ibid).

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Acknowledgments

An enormous debt of gratitude is owed to Nicole A Vincent who read and re-read this paper through umpteen iterations, never once losing patience, backing down from an argument, or offering anything but the most extraordinarily helpful suggestions (even if I did not always realise it at the time). AP.NAV: you are an intellectual of superlative style and substance and, without your tireless assistance, this paper would not exist in its current form—in fact it might not have existed at all. Many thanks, too, to Mark Rosalky and Chris Fleming.

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  1. School of the Arts and Media (SAM), University of New South Wales (UNSW Australia), Sydney, 2052, Australia

    Emma A. Jane

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Correspondence to Emma A. Jane.

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Jane, E.A. Flaming? What flaming? The pitfalls and potentials of researching online hostility. Ethics Inf Technol 17, 65–87 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-015-9362-0

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