Design Studies: Polysemy, Trolling and Lolcats

I hate trollers.

For those of you who do not know what trolling is - it's the act of leaving online comments on blogs, forums, websites and articles that aim to take the wrong meaning and cause an argument. A good example of endless trolling is YouTube. They aim to antagonise readers, and provoke unrest, irritation and ultimately, an argument.

Polysemy is the study of meaning in signs - and the conclusions that may be derived from it. Text confirms a specific meaning, and on the flip side, a stand alone image may result in several possible meanings to be interpreted.

So, trollers aim to purposely derive a meaning from a post, but purposely take the wrong meaning from the topic in hand - thus causing the aforementioned friction. They ask stupid questions, hoping to lure people into an argument. They are basically petty people who have nothing better to do than sit online causing fights and continuing to be deficient in vitamin D.

I found a fantastic blog post on this from via Flowing Data by Courtney Stanton, an interactive media and video games producer from Boston, MA. She documents the troller comments left on her blog, and has some good examples of how the meanings get crossed - through the use of mind maps, generated using Many Eyes.

world map of trolling comments

An article in The New York Times explains exactly what trolls do, and how it all began. Take a look - but it's quite disturbing, and frankly, extremely sad.

This then leads us to the internet meme. A good explanation of this can be found on thedailymeme.com. As it states, a meme can evolve - thus meaning it is an example of polysemy, where an image has over time developed a new meaning. The popular site icanhazcheeseburger.com is the home to the popular internet phenomenon the "Lolcat", where images of cats doing things are interpreted by overlaying text. Without the text - it is merely an image, with quite probably a reasonable explanation as to why the scenario has occurred. With the added text however - a new aspect is brought to the image, giving the viewer a different context to perceive the situation. This is an example of predicate transfer, by which assumptions are made due to a sentence, that may not in fact be true.

Of course this cat is not actually editing Wikipedia - however if you imagine this photo without any text, it is merely a photo of a cat near a laptop, however with the text - you instantly have a sense of a "personality" and get the general scenario that is insinuated by the text.