Editorial feature

In their polemic, Organisational Misbehavior (1999), Stephen Ackroyd and Paul Thompson examine a category of activities they define as ‘anything you do at work you are not supposed to do’. According to their analysis, misbehaviours such as ‘messing around’ and practical joking involve a more or less explicit form of resistance to and undermining of prevailing structures. Most social systems can tolerate a degree of ‘off-message’ activity and can sanction office celebrations, festive parties, dress-down Fridays, hotel spa away-days, paint-ball team-building, and so on. Resistance to and the undermining of structures, however, signals something far stronger. In Kanhadilok and Watts (2013) we posit two ‘zones’: a ‘play zone’ that encompasses all of those physical, and virtual, spaces where play, low-conforming or non-conforming activity can commonly take place, including sporting arenas, parkland, woodlands, youth centres, arcades, playgrounds, theme parks, bedrooms, social networking, game-worlds etcetera. A ‘no-play zone’ entails those spaces where unruly non-conformity is deemed a distraction, inappropriate, uninvited, curtailed: a three-lane motorway, a church, unlit streets, a busy construction site, the company board-room, some lecture theatres, classrooms, a funeral, and so on.

Our broad interest lies in transgressive behaviours, in spaces both physical and virtual. There are numerous examples where the Internet fosters non-conformity, adolescent rebellion, activities we have labelled the ‘dark side’ of Internet use (Crowe & Watts, 2012). While young ‘digital natives’ are instinctive and avid consumers of the Net, they are also constructors and re-shapers of its online content. They create and exploit digital spaces for social interaction, identity expression, media production and consumption – and do so with a proliferation of voices, cultural forms and styles. While much of this is innocuous, broadly courteous and dignified, there exist the negative, risky or inappropriate uses of the Internet such as ‘Internet addiction’, gaming addiction, exposure to sexually explicit material, online victimisation, harassment, cyber-bullying, sexual solicitation, and so on. There has been little exploration of youth involvement in these marginal, resistive, undermining activities.

For example, in the online world of social networking there is a growing trend towards establishing memorials to friends and loved ones who recently died. It is perhaps fitting that friends attach digital messages of condolence and support in much the way one might sign a book of remembrance at a funeral or cremation. Increasingly, however, ‘commemorators’ far exceed the usual ‘friends and family’, going well beyond incidental sympathisers. There are numerous network users who actively seek out memorial pages and postings, engaging in a form of funereal ‘grief tourism’. At an anecdotal level, a friend recently reported that a page dedicated to her recently deceased brother carried the following posts:

I didn't know you in real life but I feel a connection with you on here – I will think of you.

I never knew you but I will miss you.

She counted 56 similar postings, people who used the inter-connectivity of the social network to first source the memorial page, and then write on his wall. This is not an isolated incident. When Travis McFee was killed on Christmas Eve 2010 in a car crash, his Facebook memorial attracted over 700 people – far more than could possibly have known him in real life. Similarly, following his suicide, Facebook memorials for 15-year-old Tom Mullaney included tributes from people who had no prior contact with him. Social networks encourage – even require – that identity and community be played out in very public ways. As 16-year-old ‘grief tourist’ Emily explained:

Nearly everyone on Facebook scans other people's pages, it just happens that we cruise the sad things, searching for memorial sites and similar stuff. Sometimes it is just curiosity, learning more about people's lives. If you can share in things that are good, then why not share their hard times or when things get bad? Other times it is trying to be in something bigger – after a murder or something – like you are part of it. Its exciting!

This type of tourism is neither new nor confined to the cyber-world. ‘Grief’ or dark tourism emerged from contemplations of death and tragedy, a thanatoptic tradition from the Middle Ages. Dark tourism has become a popular and profitable travel niche, often culturally informed: we watch the film Schindler's List, we visit Auschwitz; we see the news, we add ‘Ground Zero’ to our New York itinerary. Tours of wartime battle sites; English Heritage's darker moments of history; brochures featuring the visceral details of Roman arenas and amphitheatres; travel websites offer sections dedicated to ‘thana-tourism’, replete with a ‘top 10 of Dark Locations’. Whilst such tourists may appear morally suspect, perhaps morbid, grief tourists are simultaneously socially anxious – the sites they visit may prompt such questions as ‘How could this have happened?’

So far, perhaps an interesting sociological phenomenon. Within social media, however, there is a clearly transgressive dimension to these activities. The memorials for McFee and Mullaney, for example, were both hit by a form of posting that deliberately ridiculed the deceased. Sometimes called ‘trolling’ (although this is more usually a term for any form of derogatory remark or comment) this form of cyber ‘attack’ has become increasingly popular on social network memorials, something akin to the physical desecration of graveyards. Often creative, the ‘troll post’ will deliberately target a key aspect of the memorial, not least the cause of death. In Tom Mullany's case, an image of the boy had been carefully doctored to include a noose around his neck and the caption ‘Hang on in there, Tom!’ The practice came to prominence following the death under a train of schoolgirl, Natasha MacBryde, aged 15. A link appeared on her memorial wall to a skilfully constructed YouTube animation called ‘Tasha the Tank Engine’, which featured a steam train with the dead girl's face.

To this extent, ‘troll-tourism’ itself has gathered momentum. One self-confessed troll, ‘Cenobite-Angel’ (thoughtfully named after the Clive Barker fictional characters who found pleasure in pain), reported to us that although the postings were quickly removed by network administrators, ‘the trick is to get it all up and recorded before anyone notices – a bit like the old graffiti artists’. Like other forms of digital sub-cultures, troll-tourism has its own language, arenas where the best ‘trolls’ can be displayed and discussed and, most importantly, a graffiti hierarchy: the most creative postings gain kudos, their creators gain status. Emily and Michael – keen to assert they play no part in trolling activities themselves – actively seek and record the postings before they are removed. Michael displayed his album of ‘troll-posts’, commenting occasionally how this was ‘brilliantly creative’ or that ‘a little raw, it well over-steps the mark’.

That there is a mark, an aesthetic, decency or ‘moral line’ drawn in the cyber-sand, is itself interesting. Cenobite-Angel's own line was one of ‘web crusader’ (our expression) in that he was keen to forge a clear distinction between, and to distance his activities from, those of conventional grief tourists:

I would describe myself as a ‘Troll-Tourist’. Grief Tourists are soft-arses who seek out people that they didn't even know and then claim some connection to them. They are even worse than the ****ers who put up the RIP sites in the first place. Remembrance should be a private thing. We are not disrespecting the dead but we are making a point about the practice.’

He echoes similar explanations. The troll-tourists in the McFee case claimed the posts were designed to teach ‘kids today how to deal with all these things on social networking sites’. ‘Cenobite-Angel’ understood that such activities would cause offence: ‘in any war there will be causalities, this is for the greater good of the web’. However, in our view his utilitarian rationale, for a necessary course of action to maximise good for the multitudes, strengthen coping and resilience in other young people, and protect the freedom or integrity of the Web, were wholly unconvincing. Nor do we necessarily see these activities as simple mischief, ‘cemetery vandalism’, malice, schadenfreude or a sickening form of cyber-bullying. There have been numerous studies focused on understanding the relationship between youth involvement in bullying, and suicide–related behaviours including attempts, fatalities and risk factors associated with suicide (reviewed, for example, by Rivers, 2011) and these fail to fit the circumstances we describe.

Instead, our direction takes us towards Bettelheim's reminder that the human spirit requires dark narratives (in Bettelheim's case, macabre fairy-stories) through which to discover and make sense of humanity. This has manifested itself historically through, for example, freak shows, horror movies and, it could be argued, through dark tourism. Risk, death and the prospect of dying continue to raise Kierkegaardian notions of ‘dread of death’ and Durkin (2003) has proposed that television, film, dark tourism or gallows humour allow people, in part, to confront and neutralise the dread. Celebrating carnival, suggesting carne vale as ‘a farewell to the flesh’, allows celebrants to transform their former (everyday) selves, release charged and heightened emotions, generate fervour to deny authoritarian control, and foment rebellion. As Bakhtin acknowledges, ordered societies require legitimate spaces of transgression as a means of demarking order from disorder. There must a Zone 2 in order for there to be a Zone 1.

Virtual space has often been characterised as a lawless frontier township of contemporary experience; an arena for breaking with norms and transgressing cultural rules and values. In the early 1990s, radical journalist Bea Campbell sought to explain a range of transgressive pastimes within equally ‘lawless’ contemporary settings. In Campbell's account, anti-social activities are seen as an alternative realm of achievement for (often) young men who have been denied the conventional route of economic success. She makes the contentious explanation that lawlessness is an expression of masculinity, whilst acknowledging that the:

fusion of social and anti-social is not the collapse of the former without residue into the latter. It is the contradictory nature of such actions that need to be explored rather than dismissing them as forms of one-dimensional violence or a simplistic lawless masculinity. (Campbell, 1993, p. 202)

To this extent, Campbell reminds us that in socially complex situations transgression, aggression and ‘victimhood’ are multi-facetted, and that contemporary digital transgressions (perhaps all anti-social transgression) cannot easily be conceived as a simple dichotomy between Light and Dark. The growing exclusion of large numbers of young people from both education and the world of work, from citizenship and from effective political participation, provides the necessary foundations for emergence of a digital ‘carnivalesque’ as an expression of agency, and as a form of symbolic resistance. We need to study these forms of action and resistance together with the ways in which they interact, conflict and become inter-woven with more destructive forms of criminality.

To further the debate, in negotiation with the editors, our intention is to invite and call for papers on these themes as a special edition of this journal. The primary focus will be the non-conformist and transgressive behaviours of youth, and for studies that can contribute new insights and approaches within formal and non-formal education would be of special interest. So, watch this space!