I have been on Twitter for a few years now, and I still haven’t quite figured out how I want to use it. To this day, I mainly use it to discover writers and thinkers to whom I otherwise would have little exposure. (I have actually found that it works pretty well for this – provided you start out by following the right people, of course.) But I have been pretty hesitant to take on a more active role, tending to like and to retweet far more than I post any original content. This hesitation reflects a lot of concerns. Among other things, I am simply worried about the relationship between the norms that (should) govern discourse within the academy, and the apparent anomie that reigns on Twitter.
Bonnie Stewart writes that the Internet collapses all of our discursive contexts into one. This means (she continues) that we cannot put a face to our audience when we blog, tweet, or comment, and so cannot tailor our content to our interlocutors’ interests or needs. But it also means that we cannot count on others to approach our conversations in anything like the spirit that we maintain in our classrooms or that we expect in our journals. On the contrary, we can expect Stewart’s faceless audience to meet insight, knowledge, and critique with hostility, contempt, and obfuscation. We can expect the trolls.
The trolls’ arsenal includes some horrifying weaponry. At the limit, they doxx, they swat, they bring the death threats. But I am thinking about small-time trolls here, the kind who waste your time and sap your emotional energy by tweeting in bad faith. They’ll comment on your tweets in a bad facsimile of dialogical engagement, but they don’t want a dialogue. They want to wear you down, and they want to get a rise out of you.
The best advice I have seen: Don’t feed the trolls. Ignore them. When they comment on your tweets, let it go. Of course, I’ve seen some people do one better, besting the trolls at their own game. Here’s one of my favorite examples:
What about black men harassing white women?
— Sayan Roy (@sayanroy) October 21, 2017
Isn’t there a ‘whole thing’ to be written about that too?
— Sayan Roy (@sayanroy) October 21, 2017
It shouldn’t be only one sided criticism should it?
— Sayan Roy (@sayanroy) October 21, 2017
Of white people!
— Sayan Roy (@sayanroy) October 21, 2017
You made a statement. I asked you what about the opposite? Shouldn’t that have been mentioned too?
— Sayan Roy (@sayanroy) October 21, 2017
We are going in circles. You mentioned ‘There is a whole thing to be written …white men sexually harass black women.’
— Sayan Roy (@sayanroy) October 21, 2017
I did! https://t.co/lXZgzo8Mhl
— Tressie Mc (@tressiemcphd) October 21, 2017
Professor Tressie McMillan Cottom doesn’t feed the troll. She could have said something about the role that false concerns for the protection of white femininity have long played in the abuse of black men, but I think she knew (among other things) that Sayan Roy was not interested in learning this history. But she doesn’t ignore him, either. She responds in kind, suspending the discursive norms that govern earnest inquiry and so providing Sayan Roy with a collapsing floor as he attempts to launch his barbs her way.
Of course, if we take adopt either of these strategies – ignore or obfuscate – in response to trolls, then we have to we decide who is a troll, and who is not. And one of the most frustrating aspects of troll culture isn’t the behavior of the trolls themselves, but the way in which participants in public discourse at large – parents, neighbors, coworkers, politicians – rely on arguments that could come straight from the troll’s toolkit. For instance, Sayan Roy deploys a bit of “whataboutism,” attempting to undermine McMillan Cottom’s project by shifting our focus elsewhere. And of course, whataboutism is all around us, and has been for some time. (I would love to know who first asked, “But what about black-on-black crime?”) Given the overlap between the troll’s tactics and some recognizable features of our public discourse, we (like McMillan Cottom) face a choice: In the face of doubt, do we attempt to preserve the norms of earnest discourse, or do we ignore (or even troll) the troll?
There is one thing that I really like about trolling the troll in cases like this: It can serve to unmask the trolls hidden in the ordinary public sphere for what they are. Whataboutism in public discourse has always been trolling. It has always been an attempt to undermine the quality of public discourse in order to maintain the status quo. And treating it as such on Twitter – whether your interlocutor is a self-conscious troll or not – may help others to see that. When people ask “But what about black-on-black crime?” perhaps it was always a mistake to treat this as a question asked in good faith, and the response always should have been to ignore or to troll.
If this is the right response to the trolls, then it means complicating our public faces as academics, so that we can shift from the norms of public discourse to the norms of counter-trolling without batting an eye. McMillan Cottom pulls this shift off seamlessly. But our abilities to make these shifts require that others – including other academics, but perhaps most importantly including the institutions that employ us – recognize what we are doing as a valid move in our engagement with a complicated and sometimes hostile public. And a host of recent events have suggested that we cannot always count on that recognition, as institutions bow to outside pressure to reprimand good scholars for their refusal to treat the troll’s trash as valid contributions to public discourse, worthy of respectful attention and response.
I thought about this as I read Laura Pasquini’s “Why Academics Need a Digital Persona.” Cultivating a persona is not something that one can do on one’s own, because the contents of our personae depend on the ways in which others will perceive us, and on the ways in which they will represent us as they reproduce and respond to our activities. So if academics need digital personae, we also need institutions that will provide us with the support that we need in order to develop personae that are apt for the kinds of discourse that we find online. And while some institutions have provided this support to some people, few institutions have done so with the kind of consistency that we need if we are to bring our research to the communities we serve. In this uncertain landscape, it is challenging to know how we ought to engage when the trolls come knocking.
Rebecca says
I appreciate that you raised the issue of trolling as a barrier to professional digital presence. I hesitated to mention this in my own post this week, but it is a real concern.