The People versus The Institution – who wins?

The People versus The Institution – who wins?

by | May 29, 2014 | activism, mental health, PhD, social media | 3 comments

What is the relationship between day-to-day practices by ordinary people in social media spaces and institutions? By institutions I mean structures of social order governing behaviours of sets of individuals in a community – in this instance, an NHS Trust or a professional body in healthcare. I’ve been mulling this over for some time… Remember when it was like the wild-west? When I first started my PhD research, a little under three years ago, I had become intrigued by everyday conversations in the blogosphere and on Twitter, which were either implicitly or explicitly contesting the dominant narratives of institutions.  There seemed to me to be a heady mix of people accessing mental health services and working in them (usually but not always anonymous) having conversations with a very different quality than those I was used to experiencing within the parameters of professional or institutional discourses. These seemed to me to be often bold, public conversations that challenged the status quo and at times felt wild and risky and exhilarating. The institution re-asserts itself During those three years I’ve noticed professional practices tiptoeing quietly but assuredly from the boardroom and the ward into social media spaces. This is exemplified by the plethora of guidance on use of social media for pretty much any professional group in the health sector. They are often defensively focused with a tendency to emphasise professionalism and boundaries over the affordances of public conversation to positively disrupt received relationships and effect change. I recall when I set up my blog in 2012 a colleague asked me how on earth I’d managed to get approval from my...
When is a troll not a troll and who decides?

When is a troll not a troll and who decides?

by | May 10, 2014 | activism, NHS stuff, social media | 10 comments

A few things have caught my attention in recent weeks about the labelling of unwanted behaviours on Twitter as trolling by people who don’t like those behaviours. But when does challenge or disagreement become trolling? and who decides? So first of all let’s define the verb to troll which is described in the Urban Dictionary as: The art of deliberately, cleverly, and secretly pissing people off, usually via the internet, using dialogue. Trolling does not mean just making rude remarks: shouting swear words at someone doesn’t count as trolling; it’s just flaming, and isn’t funny. Spam isn’t trolling either; it pisses people off, but it’s lame.  The most essential part of trolling is convincing your victim that either a) truly believe in what you are saying, no matter how outrageous, or b) give your victim malicious instructions, under the guise of help.Trolling requires deceiving; any trolling that doesn’t involve deceiving someone isn’t trolling at all; it’s just stupid. As such, your victim must not know that you are trolling; if he does, you are an unsuccessful troll. The online Cambridge Dictionary has a somewhat more measured definition: ‘to leave an insulting message on the internet in order to annoy someone’ and the online Oxford Dictionary definition is not dissimilar: ‘make a deliberately offensive or provocative online posting with the aim of upsetting someone or eliciting an angry response from them’. So now we get in to trickiness – my tweet that I believe to be fair and justified might be perceived to be antagonistic and offensive by the recipient. The definitions above suggest that intent to annoy is what characterises trolling behaviour,...