Published Fall/Winter 2007
 
What the Trolls Teach Us
by Tedra Osell | ns 69
There are two kinds of public sphere: the literary/critical public sphere and the political public sphere. In London, in the early eighteenth century, new consumer goods like sugar, chocolate, and coffee gave rise to coffee and chocolate houses; trade news brought newspapers into being; and the newly dominant merchant class gave common people leisure and spending money for the first time. Newspapers and political broadsheets led to essay periodicals, the ancestors of today's magazines. These appeared in coffeehouses, where they were read and discussed. This was the literary/critical public sphere.
The political public sphere came into being parallel with, and in some sense as a result of, the literary public sphere. Electoral politics were new, too, and the Exclusion Crisis not long past; political disagreements had been akin to fighting words for over sixty years. By engaging in genial, if spirited, discussion about the merits of today's essay in the Tatler, or the aesthetic and practical qualities of the hoop-petticoat, coffeehouse customers developed new habits of civil discourse. The political public sphere embodied a new mode of political action through language, rather than force; reasoned discussion among equals became the hallmark of modern politics and governance.
This Habermasian argument is pretty well known by now. The problems with it—the public sphere left a lot of people like women, slaves, and the poor out of the discussion, and therefore never really existed; the relationship between literary and political criticism is oversimplified; the literary public sphere, if anything, helped institutionalize bourgeois power and disenfranchise the uneducated—are likewise too obvious, at this late date, to require more than a brief parenthetical summary.
Nonetheless. Despite our post-Habermas discontent, the eighteenth century generally, and print culture specifically, established, if not an actual fully-realized public sphere, what might be called the "enabling fiction" of the public sphere. Even Habermas' critics more or less self-consciously believe that we should work towards such a thing, and (though this is somewhat more debatable) we're all more or less in agreement about what a truly inclusive public sphere would involve. Identity wouldn't matter, there would be no barriers to access, and quality of argument would carry the day, although irreconcilable minority views and interests would continue to be given room for expression.
The enabling fiction of the public sphere is an illusion, but one with real ideological power. As such, we tend to credit revolutionary changes in mass communication with bringing it about, or at least bringing it closer. In the eighteenth century, it was newspapers and magazines; in the nineteenth, telephones and recording devices; in the twentieth, broadcasting. Now, of course, we're excited about the internet.
The newest thing about internet writing, though, isn't the authors or the audience. Yes, online publication is almost free; while owning a computer is helpful, it isn't necessary if one has access to a public library. And yes, reading what's published online is likewise almost free, and these facts mean that, compared to past communication revolutions, the barriers to access seem, and probably are, lower than they've been in the past, when one needed a relationship with a printer or a phone company and the money to afford a newspaper or a phone. But both authors and audiences have existed for a long time.
Commenters, though, are new. Or at least, it's new that we have the ability not only to comment, as audience member/critic, but also that our responses to and criticism of what we read instantly become a part of the text itself. In eighteenth-century coffeehouses, one could argue about what one read, but those arguments were only heard by an immediate, physically present audience. One could write a letter to the editor—and these letters were, in fact, often integrated into next week's or next month's paper—but that took time, and of course whether or not a letter was published depended on space and editorial whim.
Now, everyone's a critic. That's democracy for you. Online, you needn't wait months to hear back about a submission, go through revisions, and then wait months again until whatever you have to say in response to that article that appeared last year finally shows up in print. Academic discourse is a dialogue, of sorts, but it's a very slow one, and the barriers to entry are high. The seventeen or seventy people who read a given academic article won't respond to it directly and in print; if it generates any kind of public discussion at all, the average scholarly essay will be part of a very small discursive circle.
Blogs are different. Even a small blog will garner a few comments much of the time, and only small blogs resemble the limited discussions of subspecialists—there are occasional forays or links into other fields, and the larger discipline will occasionally notice something the smaller group is saying, but for the most part, they are speaking to and for one another. A medium-sized blog, on the other hand, will have several hundred or a few thousand readers and perhaps a core group of fifteen to thirty regular commenters. A large blog can have hundreds of written responses to each post. Comments tend to happen rapidly. A particularly contentious or well-read piece can lead to commenters talking past one another and over one another, while the software imposes linearity and makes each overlapping voice clearly distinguishable—although of course by the time one catches up on a long comment thread, new comments will have been posted.
Ideas and critical exchanges can happen very quickly online. On the other hand, the comment box imposes constraints: some popular applications, like Haloscan, limit commenters' word counts, and even if not, the nature of on-screen reading and the immediacy of blog commenting tends to keep most responses under a hundred words or so. The exchanges are quick and casual, for the most part; but then again, one can always amplify or clarify, because of the dialogic nature of the thing, or (if you have your own blog) simply link to the post in question and expand your thoughts at your leisure.
The speed of blog commenting, then, doesn't necessarily preclude developed responses. On the other hand, comments often produce a great deal of heat along with whatever illumination they offer. The barriers to criticism include civility itself, which can be used to suppress grievances, reframed as complaints, resentment, whining—that is, uncivil discourse. Breaking down temporal and material barriers to critical discourse means reintroducing the fighting words that (in the Habermasian story) civil discourse arose to keep in check.
Accordingly, online discourse includes trolls, flamewars, occasional threats to "out" pseudonymous commenters or authors, periodic intimations of possible libel suits, probably empty threats of violence. Inevitably, fast and unfiltered responses mean that some will rise to the bait, and eventually, left unchecked, arguments disintegrate into shouting matches. Certainly, traditional (academic) criticism has included its fair share of petty grudges and power plays, but in print, for the most part, we try to leaven ill-feeling with evidence and (occasionally) wit; after all, this is for the public record, and the public is ideally civil, if not always collegial.
Similarly, the emerging online consensus is to ignore these disruptions, to criticize undisciplined critics by disregarding or even erasing them. Some bloggers or forum moderators, in their capacity as editors, "disemvowel" unacceptable comments by simply removing all the vowels and letting the consonants stand. (A practice apparently invented by Teresa Nielsen Hayden and named by John Farrell, one of the commenters on Making Light, the blog she shares with her husband Patrick Hayden; credit where due.) These responses to trolling are intended to re-form online civil discourse, and within a limited sphere, for instance on a single blog or small network of blogs, they're often fairly successful. But because these editorial interventions take place after the fact and before readers' eyes, they're still, in a limited sense, public acts and are themselves, recursively, subject to public criticism: trolls will return to complain about having been censored and will not infrequently pick up support along the way.
Managing this perpetual problem demonstrates the essential conflict at the heart of the public sphere: the public as a whole contains uncivil elements, but incivility must be contained in order for civil discourse to proceed. Paradoxically, the breakdown of civil discourse reinforces our ideological commitment to it. Moderators and bloggers maintain the spirit of the public sphere by deliberately violating its letter; trolls insist on the letter of the law to test the limits of its principle.
What we run up against, in the end, is the open secret that reasoned civil discourse is necessarily slightly inhuman. It requires us to subdue emotion—anger, to be sure, but also (as trolls inevitably and annoyingly point out) inclination and partiality. This limitation suggests that the public sphere is necessarily, rather than contingently, fictional. More importantly, it implies that the fullest realization of the public sphere is textual; first a matter of form and only second about content, mediated by form.
I do not want this conclusion to be taken as an endorsement of the textual public sphere over rude physicality. Nor do I want to seem to be celebrating disruption for disruption's sake. The point here is that civility and offensiveness are reciprocal; we do, and should, pursue the elusive ideal of full inclusion precisely because so doing forces us to recognize and account for our exclusions. This is true, narrowly, for online criticism as well as more broadly for academic criticism and most widely of all for the concepts of civil governance, democratic process, and human rights. Online criticism, because it is new, forces us to recognize this yet again. Because it happens outside the established boundaries of classroom and journal, it lets the public (including ourselves) see it in practice. Eventually, conventions will be established and genres will form, and we'll stop noticing until another new disruption comes along, upsetting us all once again.
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