How online trolls teach the art of persuasion
Over the past decade, even extremely offline people have had to confront a sobering fact of contemporary existence: The bad things that happen on the internet don't stay on the internet. In Dialogues in Dark Corners, Kristopher M. Lotier examines the sophisticated instructional methods and ever-evolving rhetorical techniques of internet trolls, anti-feminists, and conspiracists.
Even actions seemingly isolated within the web's unfriendly confines—a message board raid, a cruel meme—can bleed into the offline "real world." The trolls who traffic in online outrage often disingenuously offer this self-defense: It was just a joke; you shouldn't have taken it seriously. When online posts fuel offline violence, however, the consequences of a meme are not laughing matters.
• Online knowledge communities discussed in the text include
• the internet's first self-identified trolls
• pickup artists
• the "Red Pill" Manosphere
• QAnon
Taking these rhetorics seriously, Lotier states, is the first step toward countering them. Lotier argues that these online actors are experts of vernacular rhetoric: They apply systematic rhetorical principles and use carefully developed persuasive methods. They have test procedures and refine them over time—debating first principles, broadscale strategies, and microscale tactics. In Dialogues in Dark Corners, Lotier reveals the rhetorical strategies used to attract followers and inculcate them with these systems of thought.
Kristopher M. Lotier is associate professor of Writing Studies and Rhetoric at Hofstra University. He is the author of Postprocess Postmortem and has published articles in peer reviewed journals including Pedagogy and Enculturation.
