The American Relationship to Trolling

Below I have provided a series of images that represent what I understand to be the “American” relationship to trolling and technology described by Phillips. These images display a range of contexts that Phillips provided, such as what technologies are used for the act of trolling, the definition of trolling, and the type of content that it produces.

Memes are a large aspect of American Trolling that Phillips points out in her reading. She claims that within trolling culture, memes are almost used as inside jokes. For example, “memes only make sense in relation to other memes, and allow participants to speak clearly and coherently to other members of the collective while baffling those outside the affinity network.”

Phillips also explained the platforms that enable trolls in America. For example, she specifically mentions Facebook to be a mainstream pop culture that is overrun with trolling. From this, I assume that American trolls use their relationship with technology to troll people online.

Finally, Phillip’s emphasized that the greatest focus of a troll is to gain amusement from people’s distress, and that this concept has become so widespread that it has become a corrupted version of “LOL” known as “Lulz”.