Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book describes how insignificance seeps into everyday life. It draws on meaningless human behaviors repeatedly performed, although no significance is attached to them. The book focuses on the aesthetic sphere and its paradoxical manifestations of meaninglessness. It discusses the linguistic and cultural processes through which human beings pass from total ignorance of meaning to full grasp of it. The chapter describes the main rhetorical ingredients of trolling through contrasting it with comparable discursive practices: provocation, joke, defensive anonymity, critical public discourse, controversy and lie. It highlights how reactions to the insignificance of the digital conversation do not give rise only to trolling, but also to sterile controversies that unfold syntactically, disregarding the actual subject of contention and creating an empty dialectics among equally narcissistic positions.