Flaming (Internet)
Flaming is the act of posting insults, often including profanity or other offensive language, on the Internet. Flaming emerges from the anonymity that Internet forums provide for users, which allows them to act more aggressively. Anonymity can lead to disinhibition, which results in the swearing, offensive, and hostile language characteristic of flaming. Lack of social cues, less accountability of face-to-face communications, textual mediation, and deindividualization are also likely factors. Deliberate flaming is carried out by individuals known as flamers, which are specifically motivated to incite flaming. These users specialize in flaming and target specific aspects of a controversial conversation.
While these behaviors may be typical or expected in certain types of forums, they can have dramatic, adverse effects in others. Flame wars can have a lasting impact on some internet communities where even once a flame war has concluded a division or even dissolution may occur.
The individuals that create an environment of flaming and hostility lead the readers to disengage with the offender and may potentially leave the message board and chat room. The continual use of flaming within the online community can create a disruptive and negative experience for those involved and can lead to limited involvement and engagement within the original chat room and program.
Purpose
have investigated flaming, coming up with several different theories about the phenomenon. These include deindividuation and reduced awareness of other people's feelings, conformance to perceived norms, miscommunication caused by the lack of social cues available in face-to-face communication, and anti-normative behavior.Jay Wright Forrester, in discussing participants' internal modeling of a discussion, says:
Mental models are fuzzy, incomplete, and imprecisely stated. Furthermore, within a single individual, mental models change with time, even during the flow of a single conversation. The human mind assembles a few relationships to fit the context of a discussion. As debate shifts, so do the mental models. Even when only a single topic is being discussed, each participant in a conversation employs a different mental model to interpret the subject. Fundamental assumptions differ but are never brought into the open. Goals are different but left unstated. It is little wonder that compromise takes so long. And even when consensus is reached, the underlying assumptions may be fallacies that lead to laws and programs that fail. The human mind is not adapted to understanding correctly the consequences implied by a mental model. A mental model may be correct in structure and assumptions but, even so, the human mind—either individually or as a group consensus—is apt to draw the wrong implications for the future.Thus, online conversations often involve a variety of assumptions and motives unique to each user. Without social context, users are often helpless to know the intentions of their counterparts. In addition to the problems of conflicting mental models often present in online discussions, the inherent lack of face-to-face communication online can encourage hostility. Professor Norman Johnson, commenting on the propensity of Internet posters to flame one another, states:
The literature suggests that, compared to face-to-face, the increased incidence of flaming when using computer-mediated communication is due to reductions in the transfer of social cues, which decrease individuals' concern for social evaluation and fear of social sanctions or reprisals. When social identity and ingroup status are salient, computer mediation can decrease flaming because individuals focus their attention on the social context rather than themselves.A lack of social context creates an element of anonymity, which allows users to feel insulated from the forms of punishment they might receive in a more conventional setting. Johnson identifies several precursors to flaming between users, whom he refers to as "negotiation partners," since Internet communication typically involves back-and-forth interactions similar to a negotiation. Flaming incidents usually arise in response to a perception of one or more negotiation partners being unfair. Perceived unfairness can include a lack of consideration for an individual's vested interests, unfavorable treatment, and misunderstandings aggravated by the inability to convey subtle indicators like non-verbal cues and facial expressions.
Factors
There are multiple factors that play into why people would get involved with flaming. For instance, there is the anonymity factor and that people can use different means to have their identity hidden. Through the hiding of one's identity people can build a new persona and act in a way that they normally would not when they have their identity known. Another factor in flaming is proactive aggression "which is initiated without perceived threat or provocation" and those who are recipients of flaming may counter with flaming of their own and utilize reactive aggression. Another factor that goes into flaming is the different communication variables. For instance, offline communications networks can impact the way people act online and can lead them to engage in flaming. Finally, there is the factor of verbal aggression and how people who engage in verbal aggression will use those tactics when they engage in flaming online.Flaming can range from subtle to extremely aggressive in online behaviors, such as derogatory images, certain emojis used in combination, and even the use of capital letters. These things can show a pattern of behavior used to convey certain emotions online. Victims should do their best to avoid fighting back in an attempt to prevent a war of words. Flaming extends past social media interactions. Flaming can also take place through emails, and whether someone calls an email a "flame" is based on whether she or he considers an email to be hostile, aggressive, insulting, or offensive. What matters is how the person receives the interaction. So much is lost in translation when communicating online versus in person, that it is hard to distinguish someone's intent.
History
Evidence of debates that resulted in insults being exchanged quickly back and forth between two parties can be found throughout history. Arguments over the ratification of the United States Constitution were often socially and emotionally heated and intense, with many attacking one another through local newspapers. Such interactions have always been part of literary criticism. For example, Ralph Waldo Emerson's contempt for Jane Austen's works often extended to the author herself, with Emerson describing her as "without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world". In turn, Thomas Carlyle called Emerson a "hoary-headed toothless baboon".In the modern era, "flaming" was used at East Coast engineering schools in the United States as a present participle in a crude expression to describe an irascible individual and by extension to such individuals on the earliest Internet chat rooms and message boards. Internet flaming was mostly observed in Usenet newsgroups although it was known to occur in the WWIVnet and FidoNet computer networks as well. It was subsequently used in other parts of speech with much the same meaning.
The term "flaming" was seen on Usenet newsgroups in the Eighties, where the start of a flame was sometimes indicated by typing "FLAME ON", then "FLAME OFF" when the flame section of the post was complete. This is a reference to both The Human Torch of the Fantastic Four, who used those words when activating his flame abilities, and to the way text processing programs of the time worked, by placing commands before and after text to indicate how it should appear when printed.
The term "flaming" is documented in The Hacker's Dictionary, which in 1983 defined it as "to speak rabidly or incessantly on an uninteresting topic or with a patently ridiculous attitude". The meaning of the word has diverged from this definition since then.
Jerry Pournelle in 1986 explained why he wanted a kill file for BIX:
He added, "I noticed something: most of the irritation came from a handful of people, sometimes only one or two. If I could only ignore them, the computer conferences were still valuable. Alas, it's not always easy to do".
Computer-mediated communication research has spent a significant amount of time and effort describing and predicting engagement in uncivil, aggressive online communication. Specifically, the literature has described aggressive, insulting behavior as "flaming", which has been defined as hostile verbal behaviors, the uninhibited expression of hostility, insults, and ridicule, and hostile comments directed towards a person or organization within the context of CMC.
In the 21st century, flaming is frequently observed in digital communication spaces like social media platforms and online chat rooms. Flaming is especially common in comment sections on media-sharing platforms including YouTube. Due to its significant frequency in the early days of social media comment sharing, flaming is associated with the origins of hate commenting. Social media flaming has strong connections with cyberbullying: a form of bullying in which victims are attacked using digital means. This can create toxic environments that encourage targeted users to abandon social media.
21st-century evaluations and evolution
Flaming is often considered a synonym of internet trolling. However, the frequent use of both terms from the late 1990s to 2010s has led some internet culture researchers to develop unique definitions for each word. In most cases, internet trolls deliberately post offensive and inflammatory remarks in hopes of creating conflict or chaos amongst those they target. This typically means that internet trolls are not emotionally invested in the person or topic that their trolling relates to. Flame trolling and flamebait are closely associated with this kind of online behavior.An academic definition of flaming has not been established in the way that one for trolling has. Of the variety of published definitions, many are too broad to be applied to just one word. In Peter J. Moor's 2010 study concerning flaming on YouTube, some participants reported their lack of understanding of flaming's definition. Some experts have called for the disuse of the term in scholarly contexts. In her 2006 article "What is your claim to flame", current Professor and Chair of Critical Studies at California College of the Arts Patricia G. Lange wrote that flaming' is an oversaturated term that ignores the interactional nature of both flames and flame claims." Norman Johnson's idea that flaming may be a result of perceived unfairness between "negotiation partners" suggests that, unlike trolls, flamers are emotionally invested in the person or topic that their flaming pertains to.
In the mid-2020s, "rage bait" or "ragebait" became popular terms amongst internet users to describe behavior similar to trolling. Like trolling, flame trolling, and flamebait, rage bait is utilized to purposefully incite anger and frustration in victims. Considering Norman Johnson's assessment that flaming is rooted in emotional investment, those who fall victim to rage bait and trolling may become flamers when responding to such provocative comments and content.