Ritual violence or dangerous disturbance: understanding flaming
15 November 2007
Adi Kuntsman, LJMU
Most discussions of flaming (online fights) tend to see it as negative and disturbing to otherwise peaceful on-line communities. Flaming can both disrupt the community and serve to maintain and even strengthen its boundaries, by exercising violence toward intruders and outsiders who initiate the flaming. Other scholars claim that flaming has mistakenly been analyzed as violence. Instead, they see it as sporting relations, a game, or a ritual stance that often produces a sense of belonging. Such conceptualization of flaming suggests that once understood as a game or ritual, flaming ceases being violent. I wish to complicate what seems to be an all-too-easy dismissal of the hurtful effects of flaming while remaining attentive to the culturally and linguistically specific rituals and rhetorical stances involved in it. I will do so by showing the complex structure of online fights and their multiple, and often contradictory, meanings and effects.
