The Hatred of the Online Crowd

Popular culture has been transformed by new modes of online communications and social networking platforms. From Blogger to MySpace to YouTube, technology provides endless opportunities for people to make friends, share hopes and joys, and perhaps live dangerously.

One of the most disturbing manifestions of the today's online reality is the phenomenon of "trolling," which is discussed in today's New York Times:

In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word “troll” to denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities. Early trolling was relatively innocuous, taking place inside of small, single-topic Usenet groups. The trolls employed what the M.I.T. professor Judith Donath calls a “pseudo-naïve” tactic, asking stupid questions and seeing who would rise to the bait....

Today the Internet is much more than esoteric discussion forums. It is a mass medium for defining who we are to ourselves and to others. Teenagers groom their MySpace profiles as intensely as their hair; escapists clock 50-hour weeks in virtual worlds, accumulating gold for their online avatars. Anyone seeking work or love can expect to be Googled. As our emotional investment in the Internet has grown, the stakes for trolling — for provoking strangers online — have risen. Trolling has evolved from ironic solo skit to vicious group hunt.

What caught my attention about this story is not the notion of "trolling" but the larger issue of the "hatred of the online crowd," referred as to "malwebolence."

Much of online communication is pseudonymous, and thus in the absence of fear of consequences we see the proliferation of the most horrendously depraved behavior from what is, essentially, a tech-savvy, un-lumpen web-prowl-etariat.

We know the dangers: tragedies like Megan Meier's MySpace suicide, the mysogynistic death threats to tech-writer Kathy Sierra, or the demonization of conservatives bloggers like Jeff Goldstein.

The intensity of the hatred itself is not new. What's novel is the unprecedented volume and retrievability, which is accelerated by the liberation of unaccountability.

I haven't been the subject of a social networking demonization campaign, although last week I was introduced to the term "cobag" by those friendly nihilists at Sadly No! (and I get "fair and balanced" malwebolence from extreme right-wing hate bloggers as well, who allege I'm RINO for speaking out against racist blog rings (as seen, for example, here, here, here, and here).

My wife sometimes worries about my safety, as I don't blog pseudonymously.

Much of this hatred is defended in terms of the First Amendment, and the legal protections against online demonization aren't so robust, as the Times indicates:

Does free speech tend to move toward the truth or away from it? When does it evolve into a better collective understanding? When does it collapse into the Babel of trolling, the pointless and eristic game of talking the other guy into crying “uncle”? Is the effort to control what’s said always a form of censorship, or might certain rules be compatible with our notions of free speech...?

Why inflict anguish on a helpless stranger? It’s tempting to blame technology, which increases the range of our communications while dehumanizing the recipients ... like ... Megan Meier presumably wouldn’t happen if the perpetrators had to deliver their messages in person. But while technology reduces the social barriers that keep us from bedeviling strangers, it does not explain the initial trolling impulse. This seems to spring from something ugly — a destructive human urge that many feel but few act upon, the ambient misanthropy that’s a frequent ingredient of art, politics and, most of all, jokes. There’s a lot of hate out there, and a lot to hate as well....

Many trolling practices ... violate existing laws against harassment and threats. The difficulty is tracking down the perpetrators. In order to prosecute, investigators must subpoena sites and Internet service providers to learn the original author’s IP address, and from there, his legal identity. Local police departments generally don’t have the means to follow this digital trail, and federal investigators have their hands full with spam, terrorism, fraud and child pornography. But even if we had the resources to aggressively prosecute trolls, would we want to? Are we ready for an Internet where law enforcement keeps watch over every vituperative blog and backbiting comments section, ready to spring at the first hint of violence? Probably not. All vigorous debates shade into trolling at the perimeter; it is next to impossible to excise the trolling without snuffing out the debate.

That's probably as good a description of the issues as we're going to get (although I'd be interested to read some legal and scholarly articles on this).

Read the entire New York Times article here: "The Trolls Among Us."