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Trolling the trolls: Online forum users constructions of the nature and properties of trolling
Get PDF‘Trolling’ refers to a specific type of malicious online behaviour, intended to disrupt
interactions, aggravate interactional partners and lure them into fruitless argumentation.
However, as with other categories, both ‘troll’ and ‘trolling’ may have multiple,
inconsistent and incompatible meanings, depending upon the context in which the term
is used and the aims of the person using the term.
Drawing data from 14 online fora and newspaper comment threads, this paper explores
how online users mobilise and make use of the term ‘troll’. Data was analysed
from a discursive psychological perspective.
Four repertoires describing trolls were identified in posters online messages: 1) that
trolls are easily identifiable, 2) nostalgia, 3) vigilantism and 4) that trolls are nasty. A
final theme follows these repertoires – that of identifying trolls. Analysis also revealed
that despite repertoire 01, identifying trolls is not a simple and straight-forward task.
Similarly to any other rhetorical category, there are tensions inherent in posters
accounts of nature and acceptability of trolling. Neither the category ‘troll’ nor the
action of ‘trolling’ has a single, fixed meaning. Either action may be presented as
desirable or undesirable, depending upon the aims of the poster at the time of posting
'What about the wolves?’: The use of scripture in YouTube arguments
Get PDFReading and interpreting the Bible is an important practice in Evangelical Christian communities, both online and offline. Members of these communities employ biblical exegesis not only in convincing others about the validity of their beliefs, but also influencing the development of the social context in which they interact. Thus, reading and interpretation of the Bible serves both a theological purpose, allowing users to provide textual evidence for beliefs, and a practical social purpose, allowing users to map their own and others’ actions onto biblical texts, either to condone or to condemn them. For users who hold the same belief about the importance of the Bible in making moral judgements, the biblical text can be a particularly useful tool to position oneself and one's actions. In this article, I employ concepts from positioning theory, to analyse how Evangelical Christian YouTube users read across the books of the Bible by treating similar uses of metaphorical language as interchangeable, and using them to position particular users and to make moral judgements about their actions. The analysis shows that reading and exegesis of scripture can be used in dynamic online environments to map characters and storylines from diverse biblical passages onto a particular online argument, providing a common resource for users from different backgrounds and contexts. Findings show that reading and interpretation of scriptures provide a powerful means of claiming authority for Evangelical Christians in the community, and are used to position oneself and one's actions, influencing the subsequent discourse and emerging social context
Supporting Police Community Support Officers to become effective School Link Officers: Key stakeholder perceptions of a pilot professional development programme
Get PDFThis article presents the findings of a pilot professional development programme designed to support Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs) to become effective School Link Officers (SLOs) within urban secondary schools in the English West Midlands. Findings are presented via perceptions of key stakeholders: SLOs themselves; school-based mentors supporting the work of SLOs; and the West Midlands Police officer co-ordinating aspects of the project. The agreed professional development model comprised a two-day induction programme; school-based mentoring and coaching; and SLOs’ reflections via a small-scale action research project.
Findings reveal the complexities of community policing in contemporary urban secondary school contexts and the challenges of enhancing the professional status of the SLO. Although PCSOs have been working as SLOs for several years, preparation for this role has been inadequate and the issue has generally been overlooked in literature. The pivotal role of effective school-based mentorship, opportunities for reflection and gaining national professional recognition via the action research project emerge as particularly positive features of the professional development model. With the ultimate aim of safeguarding young people, recommendations are also made to further develop the model to enhance SLOs’ professional learning and effectiveness and maximise inter-professional working
Infantile accountability: When big data meet small children
Get PDFThis article examines a government attempt to impose testing of 4-year-olds as a baseline against which to ‘hold primary schools accountable’ for children’s subsequent progress. It examines the various forms of baseline testing in this experiment and analyses the misleading claims made for the ‘predictive validity’ of baseline scores. The article also takes a broader look at standardised ways of tracking children’s attainment and progress to the end of primary school and tacit assumptions of linear progress underpinning large-scale data-based accountability processes
The Legacy of the Child Development Group of Mississippi: White Opposition to Head Start in Mississippi, 1965–1972
Get PDFIan McEwan’s Sweet Tooth : ‘Put in porphyry and marble do appear’
No full textoai:newman.collections.crest.ac.uk:8248Chapter Summary: In the early 1970s, Ian McEwan’s first published stories appeared in the United Kingdom and the United States, some of which remain uncollected. This stage of his career is reflected but distorted in the biography of the writer Tom Haley in McEwan’s Sweet
Tooth (2012), a complex, polyreferential, sly, refracted novel whose debts range from non-fiction works like Frances Stonor Saunders’ Who Paid the Piper?: CIA and the Cultural Cold War (1999) to Edmund Spenser’s piece of late sixteenth-century juvenilia ‘Ruines of Rome’