Your thinking speaks for itself, I don't need to say anything. James elw@stderr.org wrote:
Subject: Re: [Air-l] we need a better word than lurking
I am hoping that someone who is "more established" than I will challenge this argument.
Really, what's to challenge? These are my opinions and observations, formed over a fairly long period of time, and I'm not likely to change them. A further question - what, really, is the problem with negatively-connoted terms? They are assigned to actions that are most frequently understood as highly obnoxious: one almost *expects* the descriptive terms to accrue emotional baggage. What, exactly, is your beef with trolls? --elijah
James
elw@stderr.org wrote:
Subject: Re: [Air-l] we need a better word than lurking
IMHO, the use of lurker, troll, flame, sockpuppet etc. is the language of folklore and not the language of scholarship. For that reason they lack operational definition and carry with them the negative connotations of fokloric understanding. Various scholars on this list have challenged their use. Susan Lange comes to mind.
Folk understandings and scholarly understandings of terminology are often not terribly different.
Terms such as "troll" have consensus-based definitions, evolved over a period of many years. I don't think anyone would disagree that a "troll" is someone who is violating the established, historical conventions of the listserv in an antagonistic fashion. "Flaming", or making caustic remarks toward, the established principals (or other active participants) of an organization is certainly trollish behavior. We call the folks who do this out of a lack of understanding of the group's norms "newbies", or "n00bs", who may find the group's reactions rather perplexing due to their (the newbie's) lack of understanding of pre-existing relationships.
Is this a set of folk definitions, or scholarly? It would pass in many circles as either, depending on the experiences and situatedness of the reader. Each term certainly has a workable operationalization - claims to the contrary fall short of argumentative aims...
--elijah _______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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