‘Shitpost’ – a form of trolling that involves hijacking genuine conversations with a flood of worthless content – is the American Dialect Society’s Digital Word of the Year for 2017. After a year of chaotic communications online, this choice shows people taking responsibility for their role in digital spaces. We explore the insights behind the word, and why Americans are acknowledging the role of trolls.
Each year, the American Dialect Society chooses the words that are most relevant to contemporary culture. While ‘fake news’ took the prize for overall Word of the Year, the ADS breaks down subcategories for words in different contexts. For its Digital Word of the Year, which is meant to sum up the tone of online discussions over the course of the past year, the winning word is ‘shitpost’ – the “posting of worthless or irrelevant online content intended to derail a conversation or to provoke others.” Shitpost, rather than implying a poor quality post, refers to online behaviour that is intentionally bad, with the ultimate aim of sabotaging or derailing genuine discussion through its sheer awfulness. As The Daily Dot notes, “incoherent jokes, hasty Photoshopping, mashups, irrelevance, errors in spelling and grammar – all are the hallmarks of the shitpost.”
What does the ADS’s choice say about 2017’s discourse? 2016’s Word of the Year, 'dumpster fire', refers to a disastrous situation that’s handled badly. The phrase – and the GIF that spawned it – were used emphatically in reference to the 2016 presidential campaign, which many Americans perceived as chaotic beyond their control.
While this year’s word shares its predecessor’s pessimism, shitpost implies a sense of greater control on the part of the user – unlike dumpster fire, which shifted some of the blame onto fake news and filter bubbles, suggesting poor management of 2016’s preexisting social and political ills. With the internet awash with Pepe memes and Twitter Nazis, and 41% of Americans having been harassed online, people are now acknowledging their own role in creating and perpetuating an unhealthy online landscape. By shaking off the fatalist sentiment of dumpster fire in favour of a word that attributes blame, the American Dialect Society is adapting its lexicon to make space for trolls, in the hopes that the right words will give shape to a conversation about how individuals impact the status quo.
Mira Kopolovic is a behavioural analyst at Canvas8, which specialises in behavioural insights and consumer research. She has a MA which focused on visual culture and artist-brand collaborations, and spends her spare time poring over dystopian literature.
