Troll in the Dungeon

In his book, You Are Not a Gadget, Jaron Lanier discusses a group of people on the Internet who are called “trolls”. But what exactly are trolls? If you are an avid Internet user, you probably have encountered a troll or two during your time online. According to Lanier, a troll is “a term for an anonymous person who is abusive in an online environment”. Increasingly in the past few years, trolls have become quite a problem on the Internet.

Lanier’s first mention of trolls is during in his first chapter, “Emphasizing the crowd means deemphasizing individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad moblike behaviors. This leads not only to empowered trolls, but also to a generally unfriendly and unconstructive online world. In his book, Habits of the Heart, Bellah says that “a community attempts to be an inclusive whole, celebrating the interdependence of public and private life and of the different callings of all” (Bellah 72). Jaron specifically says that it is a lack of community that allows trolls to thrive. Many trolls can be found on the site called 4chan (mainly the /b/ threads). 4chan is a forum site and users do not have specific identities and make posts anonymously. This makes it easier for people to not feel bad about being completely rude or down right mean to someone and invokes a mob like actions. Trolling often leads to cyber bullying and there have been accounts of kids who killed themselves because they were trolled too much.

 

Even though “it would be nice to believe that there is only a minute troll population living among us. But in fact, a great many people have experienced being drawn into nasty exchanges online”. Trolls are far more common than people think and are spreading to other sites like Reddit or Youtube. Anyone can be a troll but that does not mean you should be one. Trolling may end up being a large problem if people don’t take a step back and stop “feeding the troll”.