There is no doubt that pranksters exist on the internet, and that sometimes comments within online communities are made only to cause trouble, display vulgarity and insult. However, these impersonal comments from strangers can almost be deleted as spam, irrelevant internet junk that we skip over in our email and web travels without second thought. More interesting is how hurtful comments can be when written by those considered to be our internet buddies, when they know which of our buttons to push to elicit a reaction and when it feels like the attack is personal. These are flames. The motives driving these kind of flamers are not always malicious, and it’s not just the words that are causing an emotive reaction. In this paper flaming is defined as a written comment, viewed by a persona or virtual community, that is sent or received with hostility. This paper will examine how both the flamer and the reader influence a hostile environment (Thompsen, 1993) and why flaming is not just an amusement of pranksters but a tool employed by users to assert and control their online identity. Most importantly, the paper will show that flaming and associated behaviours are not always driven by malicious intent, but inexperience, frustration, the psychological desire to experience thrill, ease tension and assert dominance (Alonzo & Aiken, 2004) as well as conflict with online community norms (Aakhus & Rumsey, 2010). Flamers can be productive internet citizens, and their opposing personas sometimes overlap.
