Opinion: Furious trolls are everywhere
By Sara Scribner, Slate
A young poet, enough of a rising star to be profiled in the New York Times magazine, posts a poem called “The Rape Joke.” It begins, “The rape joke is that you were 19 years old. The rape joke is that he was your boyfriend.” It is about as intense and intimate as an online post can get. In the magazine article, the poet’s mother reads the poem, but it is the comment thread that makes the mother cry. “Do you see what these people were saying about you?” her mother asked. “Mom, it’s OK,” the writer, Patricia Lockwood, said. “It’s just the Internet.”
Internet cruelty is nothing new. It might only surprise children and the uninitiated, who dip into the public sphere for the first time and are shocked by what comes back at them. But Lockwood’s response reveals a generational shift. Her mother calls the commentators “people.” Lockwood identifies them as “the Internet,” a strange hybrid of human and computer, innately vicious but also ubiquitous, phenomena to be ignored.
Others have a more difficult time ignoring it.
After reaching out to her father’s mourning fans, Robin Williams’ daughter Zelda became a target of sadistic trolls — piling trauma upon trauma. She closed her Instagram account and shut down her Twitter feed. A budding journalist who had just had one of her first stories posted on her university newspaper’s website was so stunned by the comments that she decided to find another line of work. A young writer in New York City who was photographed trying to make ends meet by hauling his typewriter to the High Line and busking stories was savaged online. (He ended up writing an article about his ordeal called “I Am an Object of Internet Ridicule, Ask Me Anything.”)
The list of examples seems endless, and there doesn’t seem to be a single space online that is free from overblown antagonistic invective. Once, when speaking to an almost impossibly sweet colleague, I voiced some concerns about my son’s eating habits. She told me to post on an online forum for moms. Seemed like a good idea at the time. The flowing curlicues and sweet-pea-pink background of the site’s design must have lulled me into some kind of trance, so the vitriol that came back was a shock. Internet moms are angry, too, real angry. And they just hate you.
Sarah S.is a really crappy writer. Hahahaha!
Admin:
Thank you for providing a very interesting, well written article.
Very thoughtful article. I don’t have a solution to the whole problem any more than most people, but I do know that in our own time and place, we can stick to analyzing a message and not attack the messenger.
I am one who has been repeatedly attacked by website posts and anonymous hate email over some of my historical research and findings. I find relevance in Gwyneth Paltrow’s words on the subject, “[You] cannot be more than an external representation of whatever hurts the trolls keep inside themselves.” Have at it trolls…
David, you get attacked because you express your findings with a certainty that does not exist in your line of endeavor.
From the article: “Nicholas Carr, the author of the book _The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains_, says that we don’t have ‘those cues that impose restraint on people. You don’t get that social feedback. And the feedback that you do get is the feedback that says I’m getting more attention by being nasty or being hostile so I’ll ramp it up even further and get more attention.'”
This validates my thinking that so-called “trolls” are to be pitied, but ignored. They’re starved for attention, so they seek it in hurtful and unproductive ways. In child-rearing, parents are advised to reward desirable behavior and ignore undesirable behavior. If people respond to trolls, it feeds the problem. The trick is to starve the problem by ignoring it/them, and feed solutions by responding positively if and when a “troll” posts a civilized comment that adds something constructive to the discussion.