Football Flaming

For the past several years now, I have participated in an online fantasy football league with some of my friends back home in DC. We have all known each other for at least a few years and we have strong, close relationships that started offline and have slowly moved to more online interactions. The fantasy football website allows participants to post messages on a board for those in the league to view as well as include a sort of slogan to be attached to your team name. As a result of our comfort in joking around with each other, it has become the norm for the majority of the posts and slogans to center around trash talking which is usually geared towards specific people. The barbs are often quite vulgar and any outside observer would be inclined to think that there is a lot of animosity between members. However, we have come to understand that the insults are meant to be funny and entertain, and only in the rarest of occasions has someone felt offended by a remark.

Initially the posts focused on league-activity and mainly concerned football related topics such as injuries or impressive performances. People might brag about their team doing very well one week and then lament their team’s sub par showing the next. Gradually, the boasting turned into taunting, which proceeded to lead to derogatory remarks directed back at the bragger. The posts stopped focusing so much on the football aspects and began to simply launch insults at the other party in an attempt to get the last laugh. At first, there were only a few of us who were trading the taunts back and forth, but others praised the particularly humorous and elaborate jokes, and before long everyone was involved.

In this case the leviathan was primarily the league members (my friends and I) and to a lesser extent the commissioner. Each year we had to select one of us to be commissioner, a position that gave one the power to edit or delete posts among a host of other things. There have a few instances where the commissioner deleted a post, probably because it made fun of him, but for the most part he would leave up even the posts directed at himself. As a group of friends who would see each other pretty much everyday when we were still in high school together, we would often comment on some of the wall posts in face-to-face situations. We confirmed the norm of teasing one another online by assuring that we meant no harm and continuing to hang out together in offline settings. Essentially our offline interactions reaffirmed the online standards of communication we were using.

As Wallace discusses, conformity played a big role in our online exchanges. We quickly conformed to the standard of verbally, albeit playfully, abusing each other and it is most likely because of our previous ties that we adjusted without much fanfare. We would actually “arch our brows” when one of us would question the norm of flaming saying something along the lines of can’t we all just be nice to each other. The dissenter would soon return to form by retaliating and derogating against those who reproached him, thus restoring the conformity.