Death By Commentariat

I always jump on bandwagons way after everyone else.  I think this is a lingering tendency carried from childhood; I was an awkward freak who would never fit in with the popular kids, so I eschewed everything the popular kids liked so that I could attribute my social isolation to my own voluntary choice rather than my involuntary strange personality.  Now that the popular kids are gone (replaced in my psyche by an even scarier archnemesis: expectations), my resistance to everything cool is merely another quirk in the haystack.  I didn't start watching Bones until 5 years into the show.  I didn't start going to Starbucks until many years after the cup stopped being a status symbol.  I didn't frequent YouTube until Rhett and Link had already posted many a vid.

So as of late, I've had some really cool blogs in my reader written by smart, articulate, funny women.  I'm refraining from linking because I don't want my blog to show up on their trackbacks and their authors be like, "Who is this clown?"  If you're curious, holler at me.

The thing is, there's been a phenomenon here lately of trolls suddenly growing in number and in nastiness.  I arrive at this conclusion because 3 of my favorite blogs have dealt publicly with being struck with an influx of trolling, as well as an influx of comments in general, good and bad.  One of them, for several reasons including abusive commentary, closed its doors completely.  Another turned off comments.  The third very bravely dealt with the problem publicly, practically liveblogging every moment from being frightened to leave her house because of a large volume of threats to resolving not to let them win and going right on being awesome. 

Who are these people, the trolls?  I started this entry thinking I would arrive at a thesis, but then I remembered that College, It Is Over and I don't have to have my mind made up.  The Wikipedia entry I link to gives a pretty specific definition of trolls as Puckish troublemakers, but the term is typically used more widely to apply to people who make you go, "Really?  An ostensibly sentient being said that?"  There are some who make their comments with great effort, measured tone and correct grammar.  They really believe in what they're saying.  And when what they're saying is crap like claiming that a rape victim is lying about the rape or advocating segregation as a remedy for crime in my little hometown, well, it doth confuse me.  I know it's probably more revealing about my prejudices that I take clear verbal communication as a sign of intelligence, but come on.  You have enough education to spell.  You have enough skills to form a "logical" (by which I mean one sentence clearly follows another - not describing the argument being made) paragraph.  So how do you live and exist among people and not realize that what you're saying is so fundamentally hurtful and wrongheaded?


The other big issue I have with commenters of the second species rather springboards off my last post about internet interaction: what exactly do they think they're accomplishing?  I remember my Secondary Methods teacher explaining to us that teens are constantly thinking about themselves and how they are perceived: "Am I ok?  Do I look weird?  Is this a cool thing to do or will it make people think I'm stupid?"  Yet it never occurs to them that unless they run through the halls hollering, "FIRE!" or something equally extreme, much of what they do will pass unnoticed because every other teen is worried about him/herself too.  I think this also applies to the trolls: they somehow think that their little blurb is going to be a sudden AHA moment for the author, when the author's longer, better supported, better stated position obviously wasn't enough to sway the troll.  Us people, we are stupid sometimes.


So.  All that to say that I'm really mad that a bunch of losers are descending on people I admire and making their lives difficult.  I'd like to go up to those people in person and watch their heads go splodey while I very calmly pose these questions to them.  Then again, I'd probably end up with either a Bad Girls Club-esque smackdown aimed at me or a growled threat to get off somebody's lawn.