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Abstract
Poe's Law is roughly that online parodies of religious views are indistinguishable from sincere expressions of religious views. Poe's Law may be expressed in a variety of forms, each highlighting either a facet of indirect discourse generally, polarized attitudes of online audiences, or the quality of online religious material. As a consequence of the polarization of online discussions, invocations of Poe's Law have relevance in wider circles than religion, particularly politics. Moreover, regular invocations of Poe's Law in critical discussions have the threat of further entrenching and polarizing views.
Notes
2. I see this applied edge of the semiotic program as an extension of Eliot Gaines' observation: “The pervasiveness of mass media and our dependence on it in contemporary life suggest that special skills are necessary in order to understand the nature of media and its effects on the interpretation of issues and events that happen outside the scope of an individual's experience. Semiotics could be the key” (2008, 239–240). Gaines (Citation2007) extends this program in his application of semiotic analysis to political parody in The Daily Show.
3. See Lundberg's (Citation2007) discussion of widespread academic attitudes about conservative Christians.
4. This, of course, is from posted mail on the Landover site, which is part of the parody. That is, were they to post confrontations of the parody as such, the parody would be undone. See the posted mail at: http://www.landoverbaptist.org/mail/
5. See, for example, Hogan's (Citation2007) semiotic requirement of a shared system of interrelated meanings for jokes. Averbeck and Hample (Citation2008), additionally, observe a requirement of background agreements on indirect communication for irony.
6. In this case, this humor is a counter-example to the Greimasian (1993) requirements of hidden coherences (79–80). Instead, it is all viciously coherent, yet morally and intellectually incoherent. For further discussion of difficulties with literary mirth (parody being a specie), see Hogan (Citation2007).
8. Elliot Gaines (Citation2008) terms the use of the icons of a group to object to them acts of “semiotic disobedience” (243), and he notes that some cases of such deployment of humor are educational. In this case, parodies are iconic, but (as will be shown shortly), they are distortions.
10. Reported in the Toronto Star.
13. http://www.thesignsofthetimes.net/tgf911.html. Brouwer and Hess (Citation2007) report that the responses of military bloggers to the Phelps campaign fail to recognize the thrust of Phelps's theology, but instead mistake him to be an anti-war protester (85). The presumption is that Phelps is not serious in his commitments, but overplays them for political purposes.
14. Sharon Crowley (Citation2007) notes in “Tolerance and the Christian Right” that conservative Christians regularly adopt surprising rhetorical strategies in their public moral reasoning.
15. See Talisse and Aikin (Citation2006) for the discursive consequences of the various forms of straw-manning.
16. See Coleman (Citation2005, 277) for the case that blogging yields ‘lowered standards’ for views to be made public.
19. The following page is often referenced when referring to real creationist science fairs: http://www.tccsa.tc/adventure/2004_fair/
20. http://www.landoverbaptist.org/2009/january/boslaw.html (italics in the original)
21. Again, Landover is a parody site, at least as far as the evidence goes. It links to sites selling atheist T-shirts, it featured writers (e.g., Pastor Deacon Fred) frequently speak at freethinkers meetings, and its contents are regularly referenced by the online discussion boards as paradigmatic of online parody of religion.
22. Available on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaGgpGLxLQw
27. Similarly, P.Z. Myers' Pharyngula has a “Killfile Dungeon,” which has banned commenters for abuses such as “Poe-Trolling: A particularly annoying form of trolling in which someone falsely pretends to be offering advice to favor a position they do not endorse.” http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/plonk.php
28. One semiotic strategy for accounting for the implications here is that given the situation and the sterotypes (in this case, a creationist debating evolution), the script for the exchange is set. See Davidsen's (Citation2007) use of the situation-sterotype-script frame for anticipating and responding to presented literary material. In this case, one treats the circumstance and interlocutor as scripted fictions.
29. For an account of the dialectical function of incredulous mirth in the face of an argument, see Aikin and Talisse (Citation2008).
30. Russill (Citation2007) observes that the fundamental challenge for communication, from a pragmatist perspective, is the difference between self and other (129). In this case, the challenge is deeper, because the differences are exacerbated.
31. Another strategy for articulating this is the observation that parodies provide what Horst Ruthorf (Citation2007) calls “fictive iconic construals” of various types (282). These icons, because iconic in the sense that they are heuristic devices, become determinative of further exchange.
32. See Sunstein's (Citation2001) Republic.com.
33. See Hess's (Citation2009), observation that a good deal of the problem for reasoned discourse on the web, and specifically YouTube is the medium's “overwhelming structure and use for entertainment” (412).
34. http://thinkprogress.org/2007/04/27/fox-parody/. This is not the only case of news organizations reporting and responding to content on parody sites. More recently, Rachel Maddow reported that a number of Christians at ChristWire.org were advocating an invasion of Egypt in the wake of the 2011 political turmoil. The site, however, was a parody. See the discussion on Talking Points Memo: http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/02/rachel-maddow-falls-for-satirical-web-site-video.php?ref =fpb.
36. http://www.veryshortlist.com/vsl/daily.cfm/review/593/Website/welcome-to-the-palindrome-sarah-palins-blog/; http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/Forum9/HTML/003088.html; http://wotnews.com.au/like/fake_sarah_palin/2437045/
39. Reference to author's work.
40. The following rules are adaptations of norms of argumentative discourse from a pragmatic/ dialogical perspective. See, for example, Walton (Citation1989) and van Eemeren and Grootendorst (Citation2004). From a rhetorical perspective on such norms, see Tindale (Citation2004).
41. A version of this norm is articulated by You-Zheng Li (Citation2006) as a rule of “epistemic communicational grammar” (185).