FCJ-155 EVEN WITH CRUISE CONTROL YOU STILL HAVE TO STEER: defining trolling to get things done

Abstract

‘Trolling’ is not a pre-given aspect of a discursive environment, which we enter into and then identify as such. This paper demonstrates that trolling is contextually mobilised as an occasioned aspect of interaction through an example: a news segment aired on the Australian network television news program Seven News in 2012. This segment is interpreted initially with reference to existing frameworks, so as to make a case about how trolling is conventionally understood, and this interpretation is then respecified through a membership categorisation analysis of the segment in question. By attending to the methods with which trolls are produced and contrasted with others, the kinds of work done by defining trolling can be shown.

Keywords

• celebrity
• cyberbullying
• deliberative democracy
• ethnomethodology
• flaming
• griefing
• Habermas
• membership categorisation analysis
• moral panic
• Mouffe
• risk
• television
• trolling
• Twitter