Episode Details

Decoding interviewed by Ronan Swift.

Hello everybody, I'm Ronan Swifty and this morning I'm going to be talking to At Decoding Trolls. Hi, I'm Decoding Trolls. Great to be with you. Nice to meet you, Ronan. Thanks for stepping into my podcast arena. I want to get onto the name because I know it's a project of yours, Decoding Trolls.

I can understand the decoding bit, I think. But the troll side of it for me that was always trolling was something that I just associate with people being nasty to other people online. What is it that you understand by troll and trolling and is there more to it than what I originally thought?

I see trolling as it's about movement. And my definition of trolling is emotion, moving activity of body, speech, and mind. And most conceptions of trolling focus only on the medium like the internet. And so we focus on a particular form of communication in a particular arena. I researched many different aspects of trolling through academia, myself participating in groups online, and that led me to look into the linguistic root of trolling, which in fact led me into folklore, which is the origin of the metaphor of trolls. And eventually I realized that actually trolling on the internet is merely one form of communication.

And if we are going to understand how trolling on the internet works, then it's a good idea to look at how we troll each other in real life as well. And so that led to me to this conception that trolling is any form of communication which moves the emotions of another person.

And then I realized actually sometimes I'm trolling myself internally. And so this is partly how I arrived at the definition of trolling is any emotion moving activity of body speech and mind and so we can fit how our any sentient being trolls us our cat for instance wants some food and or they're running around our legs as we're coming in with lots of shopping and there's lots of children around and we we feel a bit annoyed or great joy, and that that feeling of emotion is what's essential to trolling, whether it's online or in real life. And it can be positive or negative. It doesn't have to be negative?

Absolutely, yeah. So once you see trolling as any emotion-moving activity of body, speech and mind, then we need a way to determine the quality of the troll to ascertain, is it positive, neutral, and the clue there is in the trial, neutral, no movement, or negative.

And so that led me on a hunt for a way of determining the quality of particular, I call them, I mean, informational units or memes, where meme can be isn't isn't a cartoon online it's any informational unit whether it's a sound or a word or a whole essay for instance well that's probably a bad example and so then once you see it as every form of communication you need you need a way of thinking okay because we get trolled positively all the time by our lover our romantic partner uh will um will have particular routines and we'll have particularly routine nice routines with our pets or our lovers or our wives or our husbands or our children which bring us great joy and what we're doing is purposefully moving their emotions and that that's positive And so I was hunting for a way of determining what's positive and negative and neutral. And that's how I arrived at what I call the code of positive trolls. I see.

So you've got a code, a checklist of sorts to determine that positive or negative or neutral. And that's the decoding part of the title.

Checklist is a great idea. And I actually hadn't made that link before. The code of positive trolls and decoding. Back in my past, I trained as a lawyer. So I was looking for a code. in terms of a law code criteria that that say judges use in cases to say to try and you know they often have these four limb tests to see whether you have the right to to do something without criminal liability for instance but I recognize that that now that the code is actually in th