Desperately seeking intentions: Genuine and jocular insults on social media

Abstract

This paper addresses theoretical and methodological issues central to the study of insults (realised ad hoc or as rituals) on social media. After revisiting the well-entrenched but problematic distinction between personal insults and ritual insults, a proposal is made to distinguish between genuine insults, which are intended to offend the target (whether or not conveying truthful messages), and jocular insults, which are devoid of this intent and orientated towards collective humour experience. Additionally, the subcategory humorous genuine insult is put forward in order to capture the practice based on wittily formulated but purposefully offensive messages commonplace especially in multi-party interactions, such as those available to multiple receivers on social media. Assigning insults to these categories rests on conjecturing language users' underlying intentions, which is a fraught task, particularly with regard to social media data. In order to accomplish it, the form and content, as well as various micro- and macro-contextual cues, need to be taken into account, as illustrated with a sample of insults taken from James Bunt's Twitter and remediatised Jimmy Kimmel's Mean Tweets. An analysis of the two practices on social media also indicates the epistemic uncertainty of insults, as well as the shifts between different insults occurring in one interactional space.