Cross posted at Daily Kos.
I’m not writing this diary to stir up controversy or make trouble, I’m writing because I sincerely believe that language has power. Language is the physical manifestation of our thoughts and feelings, and conveys these thoughts and feelings to others. The structure of language — and language itself — has the power to shape the way we think and feel about ourselves, and our world.
For just one example, in the 1960s, before the Civil Rights Movement, it was considered respectful and proper to use the word “Negro.” However, civil rights leaders decided against “Negro” in favor of “Black.” Then, during the 1980s, there was a movement away from “Black” in favor of “African-American.”
It’s crucial for any group that has historically been oppressed or disenfranchised to claim ownership over the way people talk about them. Not only does this help neutralize derogatory language, it enlists the entire community in bringing about much needed social change. By cooperating, we enter into an agreement to transform cultural attitudes that have been contributing factors to social injustice.
“Language” is a thorny subject because you have to use language to talk about it. Language structures our experience; it both creates and recreates culture, and cultural attitudes and beliefs are embedded in vocabulary, syntax, and usage. It can be like walking through a minefield to use language in order to root out the social and political injustice that’s embedded within it.
This exercise becomes particularly difficult when it extends to the subject of gender relations. Women are another historically oppressed and disenfranchised group that has appropriated language as a change agent with respect to deeply embedded cultural attitudes that are demeaning. For this reason, “feminists” are concerned with the way language is used to talk about — or images used to depict — women.
Language has been and remains the single most powerful tool through which male supremacy is perpetuated. Since the “female” is subsumed by the “male” as a property of language, “feminists” must stake out their linguistic territory and be ever vigilant to protect it. I use “feminist” in quotes because every woman who believes in her social and political equality, and claims them for herself, is by default a feminist until we have achieved complete and lasting gender equity.
These examples do not offer an exact parallel to my argument against using the word “troll,” but illustrate the power of language to influence culture for better or worse. Internet usage of “troll” is a big subject. For example, on wikipedia there’s practically a whole book about it. I’m not trying to define the word or offer a comprehensive study of what have become known as “trolls” or “trollish” behaviors. I’m proposing an inquiry into whether or not widespread usage of this word is constructive with respect to the ultimate goals of the progressive blogosphere.
I have spent a considerable time at both Daily Kos and Booman Tribune and can say with complete confidence that the vast majority of participants are deeply invested in caring about the welfare of other human beings. For the most part, these are people who are fairly comfortable and successful in their own lives, but care deeply about the systems and organizations that are (or should be) in place to protect the rights and promote the well-being of others. For me, this is the definition of a progressive. It’s someone who works not only for themselves and their family, but for the good of the entire human community, of the earth, and every living being.
A progressive is someone who can’t be happy just knowing that his or her family and close friends have nice homes, send their kids to quality schools, and enjoy “the good life” with their inner circle. Progressives want every single person to have equal assess to the comforts of life, to be given the freedom to live their lives in peace and dignity, and to have a voice in their government. This is the true meaning of democracy.
The project of the progressive blogosphere, I believe, for most participants, is to work towards preserving and strengthening democracy, and extending it to as many people as possible. This is an incredibly important project, and – if successful – could have significant consequences. In case you haven’t noticed (LOL!), there’s a lot at stake now. We live in dangerous times, and they seem to be getting more dangerous every minute. We want to do everything in our power to achieve our progressive goals, and it’s not always easy to find effective outlets for our activism.
However, I believe we can exercise our activism in important ways simply by changing the way we use language to demonize other people and their behavior through words like “trolls” and “trollish.” There’s simply too much at stake for us to waste time and energy in endless bickering and arguments; and endless bickering and arguments will always be the result when people habitually use language that is dehumanizing.
I have witnessed countless occasions when calling someone a “troll” or “troll-rating” their comment(s) simply poured oil on the fire, derailing discussions and helping to subvert the agenda of the original diarist or poster. I have witnessed numerous occasions when someone from the other side of the aisle has posted a polite comment just to test the waters and was instantly “troll-rated” into Hidden Comments. I have seen otherwise intelligent and important discussions disintegrate into schoolyard babble about whether a certain poster was a “troll” or not. I have witnessed the “troll police” stomping out discussions and people “troll-rating” other comments just to be nasty or vindictive. I argue that if we dropped the word “troll” and named disruptive behavior something neutral but descriptive, it would save us a lot of headaches and help to keep activity on the blog focused on accomplishing our important progressive goals.
I was moved to think deeply about this topic, after participating in a diary that was posted on Daily Kos by Steven D, about a month ago, on the topic of election fraud. I was inspired to go back and study this diary after I found out that a writer whose voice and opinions I had learned to respect and value got banned from Daily Kos as a result of some interactions on that discussion thread. I wanted to witness these interactions for myself and try to understand what led up to the banning.
Please note that I do not use links or direct quotes because I’m uninterested in pointing fingers, getting personal, or rehashing the issue of election fraud. This subject has been done to death in the diaries, and people are going to feel the way they feel about it. No matter how much I might disagree with someone, they have just as much right to their opinion as I have. I made a conscious decision not to use quotes or direct links, and avoid the use of names, because I’m hoping to focus on larger issues that I feel should be of concern to this community.
As I reread Steven D’s diary, I noticed that one person (with an UID in the 90,000) was subtly and persistently needling and baiting the person who eventually got banned. The comments themselves seemed polite on the face of it, but looking at an overall pattern this person’s behavior was clearly disruptive. He or she didn’t have anything very constructive to contribute to the discussion, and was way over-invested in sabotaging opinions he or she disagreed with.
Just out of curiosity, I “shrunk” down all the comments in the thread to subject, name of poster, etc, then copied and pasted them into a Word document. (Even without the text of the comments, this took up 37 pages!) Next I did a “replace” on the name of the person who I thought was being disruptive and — since Word counts the number of replacements — I discovered that this person posted 110 out of the 812 comments in the thread, many less than a minute apart.
I don’t know about you, but I call this being over-invested to the point of addiction. If it had been a bar, and I had been the bartender, I would have told this guy to call a cab and go home! Obviously there’s no limit on the number or frequency of comments one person can post in any given thread, but my point is that there are lots of ways of being disruptive completely under the radar, ways that are hard to detect and analyze, but which in this case, I believe, had serious consequences to another poster, and to the Daily Kos community, which lost the voice of a well-informed, articulate, and valuable activist.
Another side effect of the 110 subtly confrontational comments peppered throughout the discussion thread following Steven D’s thoughtful and cogent diary about election fraud, was to incite a lot of arguments and name-calling that really made me wonder. Who are the people who talk to each other like this? What would it look like and sound like to have them all in a room together, trading insults? Would it be a playground pissing match? A barroom brawl? A post-modern remake of Long Day’s Journey into Night with a family of remote anonymous strangers filling in for the drunken Tyrones?
Reading Hidden Comments over some period of time, I saw that occasionally there were sincere people who appeared to be right-wing refugees from the disastrous Bush administration. They came over to test the waters and were immediately “troll-rated” into oblivion. This seemed sad, as I can easily imagine that there will be many disaffected Republicans looking for a new home, and maybe DK is not a place that can transition them into a better way of thinking, so where can we send them? Do we just act nasty, call them names, and drive them back where they came from?
Recently I suggested on an Open Thread that there should be a site where we could refer disaffected Republicans for guided re-entry into the reality-based communities. The response was, “you can’t rehabilitate sociopaths.” This may be true, but all Republicans aren’t sociopaths. Most of them are people, just like us, who happen to believe in a “conservative” agenda that basically doesn’t exist anymore, and sooner or later a lot of them are going to fly the coop and go looking for a new place to roost. Hopefully, some of them will come to roost here because our progressive activism will support an environment that is less about identity politics and more about human beings. Yes, it’s an uphill battle, but the more tolerant we can be of differing opinions, as long as they are polite, the faster we can heal our nation and set a course for a brighter and more equitable future.
Through studying the interactions following Steven D’s diary, I came to the realization that maybe it’s time for us to grow out of our “troll-calling” phase and invest in a more strategic use of language on behalf of a desperate fight to save our country and our planet. The nomenclature of the rating system accustoms us to language that is little more than childish name-calling and steers us away from the more productive course of addressing the behavior rather than attacking the person. So my suggestion would be for us to stop using “troll” and “trollish,” and get out of the name-calling business altogether. Perhaps the zero rating could be changed to “disruptive, or maybe “spam,” or maybe just plain “zero,” since we all know what that means! And if someone rates a comment zero, perhaps they should post just one more comment that explains the rating in courteous language and then leave it alone.
I believe that in these dangerous times we desperately need to seek the common ground with each other, with our fellow progressives, and with our fellow beings on both sides of the political spectrum. Let’s seek the common ground and plant our feet firmly there. No matter how brainwashed people are by corporate MSM propaganda, they’re still people living out their lives in the same world as us, they have the same needs, and bottom line they care most about the same things we care most about. Maybe someday we will look back on our “troll-calling” days as a phase, a part of growing up with the internet, and rejoice that we were willing to become more thoughtful in our use of language when the time came for us to focus on accomplishing an agenda that is vital to our future, and the future of this planet.