Trolling and its communicative potential

Abstract

The modern world is a world of rapid changes, large information flows and almost continuous communication. In recent years, due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainians have been forced to limit real contacts, which has significantly increased the share of online communication. However, the development of the information society is accompanied by the spread of not only positive but also negative practices in the virtual world. One of the most common is trolling. The purpose of the article is to give a comprehensive description of trolling as one of the modern communicative practices, including to consider the essence of the concepts of «troll», «trolling», to determine the main motives and signs of trolling, its communicative specificity; present the phenomenon of trolling in dynamics, find out the place and semantics of trolling in the linguistic consciousness of modern Ukrainians. The following methods were used for the study: comparison, observation, descriptive method and its main techniques – inventory and systematization of language units, questionnaire method, classification method, cognitive interpretation method, elements of the statistical method. Based on the analysis of the concepts of «troll», «trolling», the main motives and signs of trolling, its communicative specificity are determined. It has been established that in science trolling is considered mainly as a kind of virtual interaction in blogs, social networks, Internet forums, when the activity of the addressee is aimed at manipulation, insult, conflict or positive ridicule, exposing phenomena, objects, actions, etc. As the study showed, despite all the negatives associated with the concept of «trolling», this type of communicative interaction also has a positive side. Since one of the tasks was to study the attitude of Ukrainians towards trolling in dynamics, experimental data were used for this. The purpose of our survey was to identify the attitude of modern youth to the phenomenon under consideration and compare the information received with the established one. Based on the answers to the questionnaires, it can be concluded that in the language picture of the world of modern Ukrainian academic youth, trolling is perceived mainly as a negative phenomenon. A vivid evidence of the preservation of the primary, purely negative perception are the lexemes that characterize a typical troll: evil, cunning, treacherous, cruel, boorish, provocateur, ruthless, immoral, etc. At the same time, we also traced the dynamics of the perception of trolling, which is confirmed by the words used by the respondents (cool, humorous, credit, best) and gives reason to interpret the phenomenon under consideration as positive as well. It was revealed that although trolling is more viewed as a destructive phenomenon, a means of manipulation, but if it is aimed at motivating constructive actions and meeting the needs of both parties, there is every reason to define it as a constructive communicative practice.