Trolls are getting the attention they don’t deserve.
Everywhere I look lately, someone is writing about the real-world harms of online nastiness.
Sunday’s New York Times alone featured articles about what writer Jon Ronson called “the Internet shame machine,” and what writer Stephen Marche called the “faceless rage” of people who attack those they disagree with or disapprove of.
Marche wrote of the Gyges effect, named after an ancient Greek who sent in six Ancient Grains cereal box tops and received a ring that made him invisible. Thus empowered, he stirred up all kinds of trouble simply because no one could see what he was up to. (Gyges would be an excellent name for a cat.)
Last week, Times columnist David Brooks lamented the “barbaric” public response to news that NBC new anchor Brian Williams had grossly embellished his wartime experience in Iraq.
A couple of weeks ago, the radio program “This American Life” devoted an entire show to trolling. In one compelling segment, writer Lindy West told about the troll who pushed her too far. Threats of sexual violence, she was more or less used to. That’s what happens to women who dare to express their opinions.
But when one creep created a Twitter account in her late father’s name and contacted her from a “dirt hole in Seattle” to tell her he was ashamed of her, against her better judgment she “fed the troll.” That is, she responded.
Amazingly, the guy apologized. Why, he asked himself, was he tormenting a person he didn’t know and who had never done him any harm? Great question, pal. When the two of them spoke on the air in a recorded phone conversation, they both cried.
Until recently, I couldn’t believe trolls were really just nasty people so I assumed there was a shared understanding that cyberspace was a free zone where one could hurl invective for the sheer fun of it and that everybody knew not to take it personally. I compared it to paintball – a harmless way to vent aggression.
Now, though, with everyone constantly jumping back and forth between the real world and the virtual world, there’s not much of a boundary between the two. As Ronson wrote in The Times, when somebody tweets a tasteless joke – something neither you nor I would ever do, right? – she doesn’t just incur the wrath of half the known Twitterverse. She gets fired from her job.
Stephen Marche told of an Englishman sentenced to 18 weeks in jail for sending threatening Tweets to a member of Parliament.
I’ve included Brian Williams in this discussion, but journalism has long held to a deliberate and intentional double standard when it comes to power. The idea is to expose hypocrisy and dishonesty among members of the high and mighty, not the hoi polloi – to go after the bullies, not to be a bully.
That distinction has largely gone by the wayside in the age of social media. Everyone is fair game. The most disturbing anecdote in Ronson’s story was about a woman at a conference who overheard a guy make a mildly crude joke to his buddy. She took a photo of the guy and tweeted joke and photo – which led to the guy’s being fired. This wasn’t a case of the guy being stupid enough to deliberately make a private comment public by tweeting it to his followers. The woman did it for him.
Then, like the fish that swallows a smaller fish only to be swallowed in turn by a bigger fish, the shamer herself became the target of cyber-fury.
It’s getting ridiculous, no? Some commenters say there is nothing new about any of this: There have always been poison pen letters. But the scale and immediacy of the attacks have changed drastically.
Not even the most controversial news coverage drew more than a few hundred letters in the days when unhappy newspaper readers had to address and stamp envelopes if they wanted to communicate their displeasure. Because space was limited, only a fraction of the gripes would be printed.
Now, a story about the trade of a utility infielder for a journeyman pitcher can elicit thousands of blistering responses. The general manager’s an idiot! No, you’re the idiot! No, the reporter who wrote the story is an idiot!
OK, it can be fun to argue about inconsequential matters. Maybe what we should really be worried about is the idleness that all this social media usage reveals. Think of the work that goes undone, the play of light and shadow that goes unobserved.
Although to the extent that idle hands are the devil’s workshop, wasting time on the Internet and screaming at strangers might just go, well, hand in hand.
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