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new media & society

Copyright © 2002 SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi
Vol4(1):51–70 [1461–4448(200202)4:1;51–70;020809]

ARTICLE

The art of invective

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Performing identity in cyberspace

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STEVEN S. VROOMAN
Texas Lutheran University, Seguin
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Abstract
This article examines the common computer-mediated
communication (CMC) phenomenon of ‘flaming’ from a
rhetorical perspective, situating the phenomenon
diachronically in the histories of invective in art and
society. An examination of the notorious alt.flame
newsgroup draws connections between the political and
sexual content of the flames and the rants and dozens
genres of invective. The article concludes with an
argument against the still prevalent media-determinant
view that holds that flaming is somehow caused by the
medium of CMC itself. Given the strategic nature of the
different kinds of flames, it makes more sense to view
them as performative enactments of identity which stress
either group or individual identity depending on the genre
of invective utilized by the flamer. This article
demonstrates that the more historical approach offered by
rhetorical criticism gives a vital perspective to an area of
study from which rhetorical critics have for too long been
absent.
Key words
flaming • genre • identity • invective • performance • the
dozens

There are few who write about cyberspace without borrowing science
fiction guru William Gibson’s description of it as a ‘consensual hallucination’
(Gibson, 1984: 51). But Douglas Rushkoff is one of the few who has tried

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to put his own gloss on the phrase. He calls it ‘a bizarre self-fulfilling

prophecy, [this] science-fictional concept of a reality that can be consciously
designed’ (1995: 2). The idea, then, behind this use of Gibson’s term
‘cyberspace’ in common parlance is that it is a performative space, a space
created through programming and communicative interaction. This is a place
where all sorts of performances occur: the ‘open-ended role playing’
(Beaubien, 1996: 181) of the text-based fantasy worlds of multi-user
dungeons (MUDs); and, more (in)famously, the performative leap involved
in ‘cybersex’ (Lipton, 1996: 337) or ‘virtual sex’ (McRae, 1996: 243), the
exchange of explicit text with a person whom you must trust is the gender
they proclaim. It is a kind of playground of identity where performance is
the modus operandi (Plotz and Bell, 1996), where ‘the already powerful
metaphor of drama as life becomes even more central to our explanations’
(Larson, 1996: 102), and where the dance of identity takes place in Turner’s
liminal space, that ‘crucible of contradictory experience’ (Turkle, 1995: 268).
One of the things that happens in this virtual world of coalescing identity,
which J.C. Herz aptly calls a ‘theater of verbal flamboyance’ (1995: 4), is
‘flaming’. There are many definitions of this phenomenon.1 In essence,
flaming can be defined as the use of invective and/or verbal aggressiveness
in computer-mediated communication (CMC). Historically, this
phenomenon is one of the earliest focal points for the media-deterministic
body of CMC theory (see Kiesler et al., 1984) which under various names
becomes what Lea (1991) calls the cuelessness perspective. This traditional
perspective on flaming is that it is something unique to the medium which
is the result of the lack of various paralanguage and physical cues. But there
are a number of problems with this perspective. First, empirical support for
this position has been mixed at best, as an increasing number of critics are
pointing out. Three articles in particular review this literature fairly well and
also generate and review a number of important critiques of the perspective.
Culnan and Markus (1987), Lea et al. (1992) and Walther and Burgoon
(1992) are the best examples of this literature of critique which argues that:
(1) the emphasis on rational choice models is at odds with most
CMC;
(2) the studies tend to be of the ‘one-shot’ variety performed on
zero-history groups;
(3) the conceptual integration of results with theoretical constructs
has been labored at best, which has led to the inability to rule
out alternative explanations;
(4) much of the work contains research design flaws; and
(5) much of the work overgeneralizes from very small effect sizes.
Second, an increasing number of modifications of CMC theory have
veered sharply from determinism, ascribing social and interpersonal causes to

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flaming which are relatively independent from the medium itself (see
Postmes et al., 1998, Schmitz and Fulk, 1991; Walther, 1996). Third, this
body of theory remains profoundly ahistorical, treating flaming as if it had
sprung full-blown from the head of the internet. This assumption of the
flaming phenomenon’s newness seems to have facilitated the turn to media
determinism, looking to a new medium to explain a new communicative
practice. Such an assumption is in want of correction.
One step toward this correction comes from a large body of work on
CMC from the feminist perspective. There are compelling reasons to think
that flaming is an expression of cyberspace machismo which is often
practiced more often against women and women’s online groups as a kind
of sexual harassment (Balsamo, 1995; Brail, 1993; Cherny, 1993; Hall, 1996;
Herring, 1994, 1996; Spender, 1995; We, 1995). Invective has traditionally
been used as method of harassing women at least as far back as pre-
Reformation England (Poos, 1995: 606–7), so it is unlikely that flaming as a
rhetorical strategy is only the result of the hacker/frontier subculture of the
early internet, a subculture which has been increasingly crowded out of the
commercialized ‘infobahn’.
An overemphasis on this aspect of flaming has its drawbacks, however.
Brail wonders about the ‘car wreck fascination’ (1996: 143) we have with
this issue. Laura Miller goes so far as to argue that the propagation of this
‘imperiled women and children narrative’ (1995: 52) is a discursive
victimization of women that entrenches chivalrous ideas of women as
property. This body of research, however, points to two important
corrections of CMC theory. First, there are social pressures at the roots of
flaming. Second, there are also historical precedents for communication
online – newness of medium does not necessarily imply newness of style.
This article will look to rhetoric to provide both the historical and social
perspective on flaming that has been lacking in mainline CMC research.
The content and process of flaming is analyzed in its most notorious
location on the internet, the alt.flame newsgroup, a discussion area entirely
devoted to the pursuit of flaming. This is a place almost entirely populated
by white males2 insulting each other in an ongoing verbal war whose
purpose is only to win, to gain status.
The perspective offered here is that flaming is part of what Bell calls ‘the
most virulent contest on-line’, the creation, maintenance, and performance
of identity (Plotz and Bell, 1996: 183). It would stand to reason then, that
flaming as a performance would have much in common with other types of
invective performance offline, performances which also are involved in this
game of identity. Both Campbell and Jamieson (1978: 19) in the
communication studies rhetorical tradition, and Freedman and Medaway
(1994: 2) in the rhetoric and composition tradition, describe genres as
strategic, rhetorical responses to similar kinds of situations. Carolyn Miller

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goes further and argues that genres are used to mediate between the public
and the private, our individual needs and social action (1984: 163). The
internet, as a rhetorical situation, requires identity creation and performance
and the creation and negotiation of a new social order. A common genre
through which this is done is invective.
In defining genres, Coe more poetically describes them as ‘fossilized
rhetorical practices’ upon which we should perform an ‘an archaeology of
form’ (1994: 161). This article will approach the discourse of alt.flame with
just such an archaeology. Although delineating the specific line of influence
from various ancient sources to the daily changing world of the internet
would be necessarily inexact, what the genre critics tell us is that generic
forms are rhetorical negotiations, the need for which recur through history.
So the particular kinds of identity performance we might see on the
internet are related to a history of similar identity performances.
This article will give a short review of two specific genres of performative
invective, the rant and ‘the dozens’. Then specific characteristics of these
contestations and contests of identity will be applied toward an analysis of
the kinds of messages posted to alt.flame. This article will ultimately argue
that flaming, as a negotiation of the individual and the social, the oral and
the literary, can no longer be looked at as monolithic. There are different
kinds of flames that correspond to specific kinds of rhetorical strategy and
performance. The CMC research which continues to examine media-
centered reasons for flames is misguided. More diachronic and rhetorical
perspectives will be necessary if we are to begin to understand this complex
and growing aspect of contemporary life.

INVECTIVE
Mark Dery, a chronicler of cyberspace in the popular and academic press, is
the author of one of the more perceptive insights about flaming:
In some ways, flame wars are a less ritualized, cybercultural counterpart to the
African-American phenomenon known as ‘the dozens,’ in which duelists one-
up each other with elaborate, sometimes rhyming gibes involving the sexual
exploits of each other’s mothers. At their best, flame wars give way to tour-de-
force jeremiads called ‘rants’ – demented soliloquies that elevate soapbox
demagoguery to a guerilla art form. Characterized by fist-banging punctuation,
emphatic capitals, and the kill-’em-all-and let-God-sort-’em-out rhetoric
patented by Hunter S. Thompson.. . . (1993: 562–3)

Indeed, flaming does seem to categorize itself into these two genres, both
of which have long histories offline.

The rants
Collections of rants begin invariably with hyperbolic proclamations of the
necessity of such an art form. Parfrey asks ‘What makes the keening

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amplitude of phlegm-spittle exhortation so necessary?’ (1989: 13). Perhaps

in answer, Espy (1983) argues that humans’ only satisfaction in a common
existential (and we would also say rhetorical) situation is to rage, since God
‘kicked [Creation] into existence the way an irritable pedestrian kicks a tin
can off the sidewalk’ (p. 13). Although Parfrey concludes that we should
cherish the invective he helps anthologize because people no longer speak
their minds, McPhee writes that we have loved invective from ‘time
immemorial’ until now, when we can witness the popularity of Don
Rickles and other put-down comedians (1978: 7). Indeed, it is difficult to
agree with Parfrey considering the popularity of sports radio host Jim
Rome’s daily ‘smack’ and IBM commercials and Chris Rock’s ever more
popular stand-up specials. Rants seem to be in, whether it is the somewhat
political and mostly humorous version propagated by comedians such as
Dennis Miller in The Rants (1996) and essayists such as Cynthia Heimel in
Get Your Tongue Out of My Mouth, I’m Kissing You Good-Bye! (1993), or the
mostly political and somewhat humorous essays of AIDS activist David
Feinberg in Queer and Loathing (1994) and Canadian curmudgeon Silver
Donald Cameron in Sterling Silver (1994). These rants share a number of
characteristics, not the least of which is a goal akin to ‘turning hostility and
disillusionment into high art’ (Espy, 1983: 13) and making ‘malice . . .
exalted . . . almost to the point of genius’ (McPhee, 1978: 10). The idea
that monologues of insult might be an indication of artistic genius hints at
the performative nature of such rants. They are a method of creating a
specific kind of curmudgeonly status, of carving out an almost antisocial
place where the solo onlooker and critic might then examine and critique
the absurdities of society.
This artistic focus of rants and invective has a long pedigree. Conniff
(1983) traces it back past Dorothy Parker to Swift. It has certainly been
around since Shakespeare (McPhee, 1978). Further historical analysis points
to artistic invective in Roman epigrams, the rhetoric of Cicero and the
poetry of Catullus (Richlin, 1992), and at least as far back in Greek poetry
and drama as Aristophanes and Cratinus but probably back so far that we no
longer have names to associate with the authors (Rosen, 1988). We cannot
draw lines of historical influence too strongly here, but there is clearly a
tradition of such ‘hyperbolic invective’ (Rosen, 1988: 73) going back
thousands of years. It is a tradition which has always seemed to bestow upon
its best practitioners a specific kind of privileged rhetorical identity.
Lest we think this identity corresponds to that of an elder statesman, the
practitioner of the invective continually seems to turn to subjects and
manners of speaking which ensure their separateness from the society which
they critique. Rosen notes a ‘predilection for scatological and sexual
obscenity’ in Greek invective (1988: 73). This is mirrored in Roman
invective performed under the auspices of Priapus, the god of the

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threatening male phallus who also inspired taboo breaking and the
denigration of ‘old women’ (Richlin, 1992: 109). Although this extreme
kind of sexual humor has faded from the kinds of published-essay rants cited
above, it lives on in (male?) stand-up comics and on the internet. Both
Richlin (1992: 160) and Rosen (1988: 84) conclude that this invective
served an important social function in communicating social and political
perspectives. That function seems to be also served in tamer essayists like
Feinberg (1994), who rails against his approaching death in a volume he
renames Portrait of the Artist as a Young Diseased Jew Fag Pariah, and in
Heimel’s (1993) essays entitled ‘Boyfriends: Why?’ and ‘Rich People:
Blow Me’.
Aside from the political angle, these essays tend to involve outrageous,
pedantic styles, as can be seen especially in Cameron (1994) and Miller
(1996), and a hearty dose of continual self-defense. Miller writes whole
essays designed to denigrate whatever ‘slimy fuckwad’ has bothered him
lately: ‘I feel so cleansed’, he writes afterward (1996: 90). Feinberg takes it
further and informs us (only slightly tongue-in-cheek) that ‘I have complete
and total contempt for you, my dear reader’ (1994: 3). This style of
invective seems to have corresponded to a specific kind of identity-forming
situation: the need to maintain continual distance from society and the need
to defend that isolated position by denigrating the society. Why this kind of
cultivated identity has been respected for centuries is another question, but
one need look only to Andy Rooney and Chris Rock to see that such an
identity still comes with its strange rewards.

‘The dozens’
Some of the interaction on alt.flame is less in that ‘gonzo’ tradition and
more akin to a conversational game, with short messages drilled back and
forth in a dizzying multiparty conversation. These kinds of flames have
much more in common with the African-American insult game, ‘the
dozens’. Chimezie (1976) convincingly argues that the dozens emerged out
of similar ritualized insult games in Africa. Since the internet, in spite of a
multicultural and multiracial presence in some of its areas, is predominantly
the domain of white males, drawing a connection between this game and
what happens in alt.flame is even more tenuous. However, with popular
films such as Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing and Ron Shelton’s White Men
Can’t Jump, as well as constantly syndicated television shows such as the
comedy program In Living Color, the dozens, or ‘snapping’, has become
more and more well known. Rapper Ice-T (1996) expresses (and then
argues against) the concerns of those who think it is becoming too
mainstream and popular. Of course, internet flaming probably predates most
this cultural dispersion, but just as there are likely no members of alt.flame
who read Catullus, a direct lineage of historical influence is not the issue

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here. What is significant is that the dozens and rants, from two entirely
different cultural arenas, have similar themes and characteristics. Perhaps
Espy (1983) is correct that invective is merely a result of this human
condition. But, as opposed to the John-the-Baptist outsider status of the
ranting invective practitioners, the dozens seem to create an entirely
different kind of social identity.
There is, first of all, an inherent community connection, especially when
performed in the black community. Murray (1987) locates similar rituals to
the dozens in gay and Jewish communities, and Foster (1974) likewise points
to other groups around the world having similar insult games. Pratt (1998)
finds it in a Native American community and his content analysis shows it
to be similar to the dozens in many ways, the most important of which is
that Native American ‘razzing’, like the dozens, becomes a way of testing
and inculcating community membership.
Various attributes of the dozens are similar to those of rants, but even
then, the context and style of the interaction determines differences. The
focus on things sexual, especially things that might be considered taboo
breaking or obscene, such as incest jokes3 (Garner, 1983; Labov, 1972), is
similar to the sexual overtones in Roman and Greek invective. But in the
dozens, there is a compelling case that such jokes are not meant to be
distancing but are instead kinds of ironic inversions. Ice-T (1996) points to
the dozens as a way of dealing with poverty and other problems often
brought up as insults (see also Garner, 1983). Sexual images, as well as jokes
about poverty, seem to be a specific way of expressing social and political
criticism. Abrahams (1972) argues that the joking is a more palatable form
of social inversion and criticism, and Garner emphasizes that the dozens are
a carefully modulated game of reacting to audience perceptions. This enables
the players to voice a kind of community protest. As opposed to the
withering sarcasm of ranters such as the currently popular Craig Kilborn,
practitioners of the dozens employ more of a dramatic irony, a kind of high-
context joking behavior which requires much of its audience and which in
doing so helps cement community ties.
The sexuality, in both rants and the dozens, might also be explained as a
way of signifying a certain type of political self-expression in a rhetorical
situation that seems to include aspects of political or at least communicative
powerlessness. Essayists such as Cameron and Miller can signify this personal
outrageousness with overblown style. Where that was less of an option in
formulaic Greek poetry or in the quick dozens, sexual themes seem to
predominate as a kind of alternative performance. Certainly personal
expression and status are as important in the dozens as they are in rants. As
Kochman (1972) argues: ‘The function of the dozens is invariably self-
assertive. The speaker borrows status from his opponent through an exercise
of verbal power’ (p. 261). Foster (1974) emphasizes this idea of a power-play

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to a great extent as well. But as opposed to ranting, where power is

signified by community rejection, in the dozens and similar language games,
power is socially conferred. The game eventually ends and to the winner go
the social spoils

ALT.FLAME
Alt.flame seemed an appropriate venue for the examination of these issues,
since it is a community where the winners gain social prestige (as in the
dozens) but it is also a separate place that seems somehow a pariah to the
rest of the internet (a social role courted by ranters). Alt.flame, then, was
located in a rhetorical situation which demanded both genres of invective, as
the participants negotiate and perform their personal and social identities as
well as the idiosyncratic and collective place of their newsgroup.4
Studies of such issues of community and social identity have typically
been performed in the ethnographic tradition. But online communities
provide challenges to our ideas of ethnography, especially the emphasis on
bodily, being-there immersion (Conquergood, 1991) and face-to-face,
performative interaction (Conquergood, 1992; Radway, 1989). Given that
an academic and ethnographic approach to this type of community is both a
violation of their norms (Kollack and Smith, 1996) and is likely to be
viewed with distrust as another flame game lie (see Zickmund, 1997), the
option remaining is that of a covert observer or rhetorical critic. Such a role
is almost identical to that of the ‘lurker’: one who observes a group before
participating. This role is one which online veterans suggest as a necessary
and usually sufficient method for understanding the dynamics of this
mediated environment (Anderson, 1996; Korenman and Wyatt, 1996)
Thus, for this study, observation of interaction on alt.flame was conducted
for a period of four months. Message traffic on this newsgroup typically
ranged from 30–45 messages a day. During the last month of observation on
four randomly determined days, the entire day’s messages were downloaded.
As much as possible, a grounded theory approach to coding was adhered to
in coding the 157 total messages for content analysis (see Glaser and Strauss,
1967).
In the axial coding step, in which categories are winnowed down, I was
surprised to find that such content themes as racism, sexism, homophobia,
and family or nationality insults were underrepresented in the sample of
flames. A common term used on the newsgroup was that these were
examples of ‘lames’. This term was not defined in the frequently asked
questions (FAQ) guide to the newsgroup but appears to denote an old, easy,
and often-used flame that is not worthy of a response. ‘Yawn’ was a frequent
response when such themes cropped up, even peripherally. Seeing as how
these are the traditional themes in the rant and dozens genres, I found this

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most surprising, and I was left with only Dery’s categories, the rants and the
dozens.

The rants
For want of a better term, as alt.flame does not provide one, ‘rants’ refers to
messages of considerable length. There were generally two types of rant. The
first type is a long parody or satire. A scene is created and a long conceit is
played out. This took the form of a blow-by-blow account of a wrestling
match, a rewrite of the film Good Will Hunting, narratives of the stupid
opponent sitting at his computer, an exchange at McDonalds, a power
lunch, a scene on the beach, a press conference, a product catalog, a
Swiftian ‘satirical parody’, and an entry in the prestigious Journal of Usenet
Stupidasses written by an academic from the Department of Fine Malt
Beverages at Bungmunch University. These longish parodies generally serve
to break the frame of whatever debate is occurring and seem to be
employed when a flame war degenerates into an undesirable series of
bickerings over who dropped what thread of the conversation or failed to
reply to which particular post. These serve a similar purpose as the second
type of rant, the adjective-rant. In the same way as a Dennis Miller or
Dennis Leary rant, the adjective-rants seem to build up a dizzying array of
invective to exhaustion point. An excellent example is the following post:
Here to what, wet willy ‘penile drip’ palmer, grim little pariah, depends
undergarment wearing rube, usenet’s whipping boy? ‘Write’ you say? And
*not* endlessly regurgitate? – you who insists upon recounting at horrendous
length these elaborate though strangely inconsistent mythologies of your
imagined exploits with *everything* you off-load upon usenet like the rusted-
out hulk of a leaky garbage scow off-loads infectious medical waste? What
irony! Permit me a moment to laugh at you derisively, you gnarled-up stump
of an insignificant boy, you who secretes lies and misrepresentations as easily as
a victim of ebola virus in its hemorrhagic phase secretes diseased blood and
other fluids.

There is, as in the parody posts, an emphasis on total originality: although

I’ve seen such Depends (adult incontinence undergarments) insults with
some regularity on alt-flame, medical waste and the ebola virus are fairly
new themes. The originality is usually meant to contrast with the stupidity
and unoriginality of the opponent. That is the argumentative content of this
flame, as it is the content of the beach scene where Gilbert Sullivan is
pounded into the sand and can only say ‘AsSfAcE,’ the product list where
Big Daddy Zeus sponsors a ‘Shit Examination Kit’ and a Pez dispenser
which shoots candy out of its ass, the press conference where Gilbert
announces he’s just had an original thought, etc.
Most flames, of course, within the ‘lame’ constraints of the alt-flame
community, tend to be metacritiques of the opponent’s verbal skill and thus

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their intelligence. But the goal here seems to be to put such a monumental
effort into the flame that the opponent is effectively silenced, proving the
point. It is the excess of the performance which is to accomplish the goal.
The alt.flame FAQ describes and mocks the IKYABWAI (‘I know you are
but what am I?’) response to difficult-to-answer flames like these. The
acronym stands for the retort used in the film Pee Wee’s Big Adventure to
avoid responding to an insult. The IKYABWAI is classified as another kind
of lame, and like the ‘AsSfAcE’ type of irrelevant response, it appears often
after these kinds of apocalyptic flames.
Taunts such as ‘learn complex sentences’ and the maligned ‘punctuation
pounce’ (critiquing the typos in a post) are fairly common and usually lead
to versions of IKYABWAI debates. As an integral part of rants, however,
they seem to be particularly devastating. In a non-academic sense, as a
person simply reading these flames, certain posts, like the ebola post cited
above, leave me in a speechless sort of awe. Perhaps it is because I am not
practiced in the art of flaming, but often I could not think of how I would
respond. Seabrook reports a similar physiological response to the first flame
he ever got: chills, a shiver and shaking (1994: 70). His reaction is specific
to the flame victim, but I think one reason people such as Herz (1995) lurk
on alt.flame is for the vicarious experience of that kind of emotional
bottomline. One post which left me with such a reaction is the following:

Alt. Evil? I believe the name of the NG [newsgroup] should be alt.weevil,

since all they are is brainless fucking bugs living in the dark hole in the center
of one, big fucking nut! Shit, alt.evil, may as well say you’re from alt.fruitcake
of the month club or,
alt.mommygavemeacomputerforxmasandnowI’malordofdarkness!

Although the weevil stuff is not so deadly, in attacking the common

phenomenon of young teenage boys adopting names like Dr Doom and
Dark Lord of the Sith, the author of this post cuts to the flaming chase. He
directly assaults an online persona, the way the parodic scenes do. In many
ways, the only response to such a rant is to reference a ‘reality’ of a self
beyond the online persona. This kind of ‘meet-me-in-New-Jersey-where-
I’ll-kick-your-ass’ response is considered as having lost the flame war
according to the FAQ and in the dozens (Garner, 1983: 40). Ranting long-
winded flames seem designed to end the conversation, to remove
possibilities of return performance. In other words, to win a flame war is to
circumscribe the possibilities of another person’s identity performance. Since
this is the only sort of identity one can create online, flames are designed to
‘kill’ another person.
Jon Katz, himself an author of a tamer version of a rant, in discussing the
kinds of flaming that take place elsewhere on the net, argues that a polite
frame-breaking response defuses the situation (1997: 7). Such an option is

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simply unacceptable in alt.flame, where the verbal warfare is not about

anything more than a sort of masculinist game of prowess: ‘Untempered
testosterone rules’ (1997: 6). As one member of alt.flame writes in a rare
frame-breaking post: ‘Do you really believe I genuinely hate these guys? No
way! I just come here to load my stress onto someone else’ shoulders, like
they do.’ It is a performative game where winning/silencing seems to be
determined by thrusting the opponent into a visceral and emotional reality.
As one participant’s private rule for judging the winner and loser of any
online discussion dictates: the first to compare the other to Hitler loses. The
person who stops the game first has backed down. On alt.flame, a person
often will simply not respond to well-crafted flames. This is called a ‘spank’,
which is loudly crowed about by the victor.
When such a flame war is won, then, a position similar to that of the
outsider invective-critic seems to be gained. A similar sort of place above the
rest of the rabble is carved out, and the verbal destruction of the opponent
not only validates and defends that position, but it also, in its verbal artistry,
provides the actual performative substance of that position. There is still an
aspect of this position which relies on the rest of the community for respect
(as the victor will continue to participate on alt.flame), which makes this
position in alt.flame a bit different from other kinds of precedent. But the
stable expression of such community admiration never occurs. The game,
unlike in the dozens, never ends on alt.flame. And even though, unlike the
flamer who is ostracized by the mainstream in a ‘normal’ discussion group,
the ranting victor on alt.flame is still a member, it is a community which
must be constantly denigrated by the flamer who wishes to maintain victor
status. In a community of curmudgeons, the curmudgeon becomes an
unstable identity, one which must be continually performed. But
considering the prestige so often accorded the ranter in history, this is not
necessarily very different from the inherent unstable identity of the
practitioner of invective in other venues of society.

One-liners
In contrast to the apocalyptic, artistic, and highly textual flame, another
common flaming practice is the one-liner. It is similar in its goals: to insult
the verbal prowess and online persona of the opponent, to silence the other
person with a spank. One-liners, however, are more conversational in style.
Sometimes they are meant to be devastating and silencing, as these examples
from different posts show:
Guys, I recommend a .38 caliber throat lozenge.

I’d rather drink a colostomy bag shake.

Run away cowardly custard.

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Clearly sir, you are a disgrace.

THANK YOU, I WAS HAVING TROUBLE FALLING ASLEEP, BUT, I

FEEL VERY SLEEPY NOW.

Ok, you’ve won the prize for the most pathetic post, now crawl back into
your hole (with or without your mother, I don’t care).

By God! You’re an idiot.

Sometimes I wonder why I bother.

Does that, in your words, make you THE saddest loser on Usenet?

Although these are not nice things to say, by any means, they do not
seem to have the visceral impact of longer, ranting flames. The last two, in
fact, seem to openly invite some sort of response. The tension here is
between the presumed goal of ‘winning’ the flame war and the need to let
off steam and stress through continued interaction. This is more along the
lines of the dozens. Winning is important but often it is the game that is the
thing. Ice-T (1996) talks about the difficulty of dealing with people who do
not play and become offended. In the dozens the crowd is key, egging on
the competition and helping out the person who falls behind (Garner,
1983). The continuation of the game provides the entertainment and
perhaps the therapy.
The procedure by which participants quote the exchange of flames back
over a long series of posts is a visual indication of the way a continued
argumentative thread is important. And a number of one-liner flames seem
to invite a continued sparring:

I am just sparring with you so far. I haven’t even broken a sweat.

For Christ’s sake, stop beating your hairless chests and flame somebody already!

[drums fingers]

So I YAWN in your general direction.

These posts practically beg for more. The performance here is something
that requires more than one to play. Silence is not the object. Although
many of these threads do end up with longer rants and claims of a spank,
there does seem to be a place for this more ‘friendly’ or ‘gentlemanly’
contest of wills. It is yet another masculinist metaphor, a heady battle of
wits as opposed to a testosterone-induced screed. That last flame quoted
above is a direct reference to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, when the

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‘Frenchman’ taunts King Arthur from his castle with such gems as ‘I fart in
your general direction’ and ‘Your father smelled of elderberries’. In much of
the wide-ranging Monty Python media products, verbal sparring and joking
are comedic vehicles where the bounds of propriety and comedy can be
pushed to the edge. The alt.flame FAQ actually argues that the best flamers
on alt.flame are Monty Python fans, suggesting that there may be something
of an in-group comedy culture here.
Much of what happens on alt.flame is meant to be only a joke and not
something designed to end the conversation and confer curmudgeon status.
For example:

Moron. For somebody who claims other lack clues, you are 12 short of a six
pack.

. . . ol’ Bill here is full of more shit than the New York City sewer system.

You’re obviously a product of the Texas educational system.

I’m so sorry I’m bullying you, maybe you need a group hug to make you feel
better.

These flames are part of a different kind of performance. It is difficult to

imagine these one-liners silencing anyone. In fact, there are also one-liners
which seem to be asking someone else to provide the joke: ‘Well- let’s not
get carried away here. There’s no proof that there’s a limit on Grubor’s
stupidity.’ This is the kind of ‘how stupid is he?’ accelerator used in more
audience-participative comedy clubs. This accelerant rarely takes this kind of
overt appeal to the group form, but when actual jokes are told for flames,
the appeal to others to interact seems clear. In flame contests consisting of
these one-liners, it is far more common for others to get involved in the
conversation. This form invites further performance and does not demand
silence.
A colleague, when I shared the content of some flames with her, asked if
humor ever came up in the newsgroup, as she thought many of the flames
were hysterical. My answer was no, because I rarely saw a ‘that was a good
one’ response in the group. The closest thing to it was the following: ‘Aw,
c’mon, Kitt. Can’t you act more devastated than that? They took hours to
come up with that shit.’ Perhaps this kind of group humor production type
of flame is a result of the historical myth laid out in one flamer’s homepage
that alt.flame began as a place for flame wars to go to avoid disrupting other
groups. Eventually a group decided to avoid the pretense of ‘civil’
conversation and devote themselves to creating excellent flames. This origin
myth (acknowledged as myth by its author) posits two types of flamer, those
with serious gripes and those there to have fun. This also seems to

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correspond to the distinction between rants and one-liners. This fun, then,
is inherently tied up in enthusiastic community participation and
community identity. Being part of a funny group is more important than
the victory. There is a real sense in some of these ongoing conversations
that, like Herz, people are more interested in having a good time and seeing
the cool flames than they are in being the ones who thought of them.

CONCLUSION
Different purposes produce different flames. Rants, usually designed to
silence, are a more individualistic production of identity. One-liners, which
often seem to invite a communal response, are a more collectivistic
invocation of identity. If rants are part of a European generic tradition and
the dozens emerge from an African one, we might expect such a tension
between an individualistic and collectivisitic performance of identity. As
flaming appears wherever discussion takes place on the internet, we might
productively examine the ways these different kinds of invective traditions
are utilized by people carving out a self in a disembodied world. Flaming is
also, as relates to both Carolyn Miller (1984) and Lea and Spears (1991),
one of the prominent ways in which these questions of social versus
individual identity are negotiated. The analysis of this newsgroup would
suggest that of different revisions of CMC theory, Lea and Spears’ social
identification/deindividuation (SIDE) model, in its focus on flaming as the
locus of the meeting of individual and group goals and saliences, would
perhaps be the model most attuned to the strategic nature of flaming.
Another explanation for the difference between these two types of flames
is suggested by an argument made by Millard (1997), who points to the way
in which computer-mediated communication straddles the Ongian
distinction between orality and literacy. For Millard, flames are like the
dozens, ‘dynamic public drama [that] creates a rhythm of attacks and
responses’ (1997: 148). The performance is dynamic because it mimics an
oral, call-and-response style of performative communication. One-liners
seem to emulate that kind of oral tradition. Rants, on the other hand, in
these excessive displays of linguistic skill, seem to foreground their textuality.
As noted earlier, this kind of invective has found its place in literature
through the centuries. That ‘literary’ performances seem to be
operationalized as solo performances is not surprising, and thus neither is
the more cooperative mode of one-line flames.
Flaming performances seem to be resolutely masculinist displays of the
prowess and skill of a chosen identity, an aspect of masculine display which
we may or may not wish to generalize to such things as weightlifting, poker,
breakdancing, and lawn maintenance. The difficulty, of course, is that as
more and more diversity blooms in the traditionally masculine world of the
internet, these kinds of performances become harassment and bigotry, a

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privileged group flaunting its privileged option to perform its own identity
at the expense of others. And while we take seriously the harassment and
the invasions of women’s online groups that are associated with flaming in
general, and certain subgroups on alt.flame in particular, it is somewhat
inaccurate and unhelpful to localize the complaint to the performance of
flaming. Camp (1996) locates the disruption of women’s spaces on the
internet, not in flames but in the sheer numbers of men who gravitate
toward women’s spaces: ‘There is no end to the complaints of the anxious
and oppressed white male on the internet’ (p. 115). Some masculinist
flaming performances are silencing and some are more cooperative (the
difference between domination and hegemony?).
Indeed, the ways in which racist, sexist, and homophobic rhetoric are
shot down as lames on alt.flame seems to suggest that we make any sort of
essentialistic claims about flaming with great caution. I doubt that it is
possible to go as far as Millard in arguing that the competitive marketplace
of ideas involved in flaming levels status and is a ‘productive hermeneutic
tool’ (1997: 158) that ‘can include a fusion of epideictic and deliberative
rhetorics as well, [and is] a demonstration that performance does not occur
in a vacuum’ (1997: 157). These flamers, some of whom call themselves
‘Usenet Performance Artists’ or ‘Net Entertainers’ are performing identity at
the individual/collective and orality/literacy locus. There is a rhetorical
negotiation of self and community here, just as we see in the different forms
that invective has taken in history. These different performances have
different social functions and emphasize different types of performer.
Further CMC research would do well to take this into account. There are
multiple and different kinds of identity performance online, and as the
analysis of what Rheingold (1993) calls ‘virtual communities’ grows,
recognition of the genre critics’ arguments about strategy and rhetorical
situation becomes increasingly important. There is a rhetorical history and
trajectory to the kinds of communication that we see online. It is, at least in
the case of one of CMC research’s most important focal points, flaming,
something of which the explanation must move beyond media and/or
community effects. The internet and CMC are not things which have
essential ‘natures’ and about which we can generalize, any more than
flaming is a united effect or symptom that can be reduced to either a single
operationalization or cause. Flaming is a strategic negotiation of rhetorical
and social situation. CMC theory would remind us that it also negotiates
with a technological situation, but this connection has been too often read
as a mutely deterministic one. In failing to take into account the history of
the discourses it has analyzed, CMC theory has remained mute to its own
history as well, a history of quasi-Luddite and premature responses to new
media that assume them to be the repository of necessarily pathological or
less rich forms of communication (see Innis, 1975) partly because the

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historical and cultural contexts of such media are so unavailable to the

earliest researchers working with a new medium.
Yet this body of theory stills hangs over researchers. New media
researchers should no longer have their ‘contributions’ limited to how they
might extend one particular body of theory by asserting what their research
must mean for the nature of the internet. Qualitative and rhetorical
researchers should not be forced to allocate valuable argumentative space
toward the simple defense of first principles: that technologies are only one
determinant of communication and that, indeed, technologies themselves are
not historical magic bullets but are the products of cultural and ideological
and social change as much as they are the instigators.

Acknowledgement
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Western States Communication
Association conference, Sacramento, CA, February 2000. The author would like to
thank Kristen Valentine, Todd Graham and the editors and the reviewers for their help in
revising the manuscript.

Notes
1 These varying definitions are aptly catalogued in Thompsen’s review of the flaming
literature (1996: 299).
2 Although falsifying identity is common on the internet, statistics given by Balsamo
(1995: 361) and Lee (1996: 283) show that males make up over 85 percent of
internet users, making the likelihood very strong that most of those who present
themselves as male on alt.flame actually are males. Of course, gender harassment
literature might lead us to expect that women often pose as males to avoid sexual
come-ons and other such messages, but it is unlikely that a person concerned with
such things would actively participate in the alt.flame group anyway.
3 These games tend to be played by men, who would make such remarks, but Ice-T
(1996: 10) and Chimezie (1976: 413) point to females who play the game, as well.
4 And this focus on the oscillations of socially salient and individually salient identities
brings us back to some of the CMC literature, specifically Lea and Spears’ SIDE
model, a model which purports to explain flaming as an example of how individual
identity becomes more important than group identity in a given situation and
uninhibited flaming behavior arises (see also Lea et al., 1992). The problem is that
flaming is reduced to a variable in such work and is necessarily operationalized as a
monolithic type of behavior. But perhaps the notions of different kinds of flames
operating on differentially salient identities would be useful in further work in the
SIDE tradition.

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STEVEN S. VROOMAN is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English &

Communication Studies at the Texas Lutheran University. His main research interests are the
culture of the internet and flaming, in particular. Recent publications include ‘Flamethrowers,
Slashers and Witches: Gendered Communication in a Virtual Community, Qualitative Research
Reports in Communication 2 (Fall, 2000) (printed in Communication Quarterly 48). He also
studies film genre, fan fiction and audience response to popular culture. Address: Department
of English & Communication Studies, Texas Lutheran University, 1000 W. Court Street, Seguin,
TX 78155, USA. [email: svrooman@tlu.edu]

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