This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture

an “indignant correction” was the ultimate goal of these so-called trollers.

the fact that online trolling is par for the mainstream cultural course.

trolls reveal the thin and at times nonexistent line between trolling and sensationalist corporate media.

mistakes the symptom for the disease.

trolling is, or at least can be, an extremely effective rhetorical strategy.

dirt is best understood as matter out of place, and is intelligible only in relation to existing systems of cleanliness:

Like a spiteful housecat whose sole interest seems to be property damage, trolls take perverse joy in ruining complete strangers’ days.

that trolls’ behaviors provide an implicit, and sometimes outright explicit, critique of existing media and cultural systems—

trickster] is not the declarative speaker of traditional prophecy, but an erasing angel who cancels what humans have so carefully built, then cancels himself.”

Mary Douglas’s exploration of the related concepts of dirt and taboo.