Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things by Whitney Phillips
Whitney Phillips, in This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, considers the political and cultural significance of trolling. Phillips admits that this is not an easy task given the complexity of trolling, something immediately evident as she walks the reader through the etymology of the term and the history of the behavior. The definition of the term, however, is not the only methodological hurdle Phillips faces when she undertakes the study. She also discusses the impediments to understanding the individuals and behaviors behind trolling, citing anonymity, the reluctance of her subjects to reveal motivations, and the difficulty of infiltrating and understanding their many online worlds.
Despite these obstacles, however, Phillips has managed to lend insight into trolling by setting aside the usual parameters of the debate, which pivots between whether trolling is “good” or “bad” or “normal” or “abnormal.” In fact, Phillips begins her discussion with the caveat, “just as it would be a mistake to dismiss participating trolls’ behavior as politically meaningless, the impulse to posit clear political meaning is similarly misguided” (p. 6). Phillips realizes that trolling might be described as anything from Nietzschean to Toquevillian. If we pick and choose our philosophical principles and the diverse range of activities, techniques, and exploits defined under the aegis of “trolling” carefully, it can be viewed as limiting freedom, or, just as easily, as promoting it. Phillips’s desire to step outside of the dichotomies of the current debates frees her to explore different methodological approaches to the cultural and political significance of trolling. This is where her contributions lie.
To capture the complexity of trolling and the individuals behind it, Phillips’s study engages “digital media studies, folklore studies, cultural studies, subcultural studies, and critical race and feminist theories” (p. 37). In drawing from a wide range of methodologies, Phillips is not only challenging the usual social scientific methods which have characteristically separated academic disciplines into “silos,” she is also expanding the meaning of STS (Science, Technology, and Society). STS prides itself on an interdisciplinary approach to studying and understanding the complexities of the relationships existing between society and technology. Inevitably, however, STS has sometimes made its own silo of sorts by designating what falls in and out of the disciplinary approaches and methodologies. This process of defining what “is” STS and what “isn’t” STS is more and more difficult as society and technology intertwine in ways that defy prior STS practices.
Phillips’s work is a case in point. She does not cite the usual academic references that would characterize an STS work. Instead, she creates her [End Page 710] own methodology by picking and choosing among the academic disciplines to reach into an activity that also defies the usual categorizations. This diverse approach allows her to point to new ways of understanding trolling, not as a cultural aberration but instead as “behaviors fall(ing) on the extreme end of the cultural spectrum” (p. 10). This insight allows Phillips to reject the premise of others who have asserted “the idea that trolls, and trolls alone, are why we can’t have nice things online” (p. 11). This methodological starting point also allows Phillips to distort the usual academic and philosophical lenses through which we evaluate trolling and in doing so, enables her to further complicate the usual categories we might be tempted to use as STS researchers.
Phillips readily admits that the process of understanding trolling cannot be accomplished with complete clarity. But this is exactly the value of her work. Understanding new STS phenomena cannot rely exclusively on the past methodological approaches that have so far defined the work we recognize as STS. Instead, the new technologies, users, and uses demand an opening of our academic silos so that we are no longer focused on preserving academic boundaries, but rather are more interested in understanding the complexity of society and technology in ways not yet tried or even imagined. Praising Phillips’s work for its innovation...
