Internet trolling, a form of antisocial online behavior, is a serious problem plaguing social media. Skillful trolls can lure entire communities into degenerative and polarized discussions that continue endlessly. From analysis of data gathered in accordance with established classifications of trolling-like behavior, the paper presents a conversation analysis of trolling-like interaction strategies that disrupt online discussions. The authors argue that troll-like users exploit other users’ desire for common grounding – i.e., joint maintenance of mutual understanding and seeking of conversational closure – by responding asymmetrically. Their responses to others deviate from expectations for typical paired actions in turn-taking. These asymmetries, described through examples of three such behaviors – ignoring, mismatching, and challenging – lead to dissatisfactory interactions, in that they subvert other users’ desire for clarification and explanation of contra-normative social behavior. By avoiding clarifications, troll-like users easily capture unsuspecting users’ attention and manage to prolong futile conversations interminably. Through the analysis, the paper connects trolling-like asymmetric response strategies with concrete data and addresses the implications of this nonconformist behavior for common grounding in social-media venues.
This research examines the effects of normativity on difficulties experienced with English oral production in Finland and Japan. Moyer’s classification of factors influencing second language acquisition (2004) as well as language ideology theory (Garrett, 2010; Milroy, 2007) are used as a framework for an analysis of 56 semi structured interviews with Finnish and Japanese adult learners of intermediate level English. Self-reported experiences related to speaking English were annotated with appropriate codes and analyzed using content analysis. The results show that normativity related to the English language explains many of the difficulties learners experience with speaking English, and that this normativity is essentially connected to social factors as well as instruction and input factors in language learning.
This study compares the effectiveness of different trolling strategies in two online contexts: politically oriented forums that address issues like global warming, and interest-based forums that deal with people’s personal interests. Based on previous research, we consider trolling as context-bound and suggest that relevance theory and common grounding theory can explain why people may attend and react to certain types of troll posts in one forum, but pay scant attention to them in another. We postulate two hypotheses on how successful (i.e., disruptive) trolling varies according to context: that trolls’ messaging strategies appear in different frequencies in political and interest forums (H1), and that context-matching strategies also produce longer futile conversations (H2). Using Hardaker’s categorization of trolling strategies on a covert–overt continuum, our statistical analysis on a dataset of 49 online conversations verified H1: in political forums covert strategies were more common than overt ones; in interest forums the opposite was the case. Regarding H2 our results were inconclusive. However, the results motivate further research on this phenomenon with larger datasets.
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