I have participated in a number of different online forums, on a variety of different topics. Mostly, they have to do with politics, culture, and sexuality.
As is the case in the medium of online forums, protected by anonymity and faceless avatars, there are ways that forum participants feels enabled to activate their "troll" selves.
Trolls
According to the Indiana University Information Technology Services (which I was linked to from the wikipedia article about trolls), trolls and the culture of internet trolling are described as follows:
"In email discussion lists, online forums, and Usenet newsgroups, a troll is not a grumpy monster that lives beneath a bridge accosting passers-by, but rather a provocative posting intended to produce a large volume of frivolous responses. The term can also refer to someone making such a posting ("a troll") or to the action ("trolling", "to troll").
The content of a troll posting generally falls into one of several categories. It may consist of an apparently foolish contradiction of common knowledge, a deliberately offensive insult to the readers of a newsgroup or mailing list, or a broad request for trivial follow-up postings. The result of such postings is frequently a flood of angry responses. In some cases, the follow-up messages posted in response to a troll can constitute a large fraction of the contents of a newsgroup or mailing list for as long as several weeks. These messages are transmitted around the world to thousands of computers, wasting network resources and costing money for people who pay to download email or receive Usenet news. Troll threads also frustrate people who are trying to carry on substantive discussions."
While I am easily infuriated by trolling, most trolls who write on online forums are simply impulsive bullies or self-conscious irritants... The best way to deal with them is to Ignore Them.
But there is a more sinister sort of Troll... and I call these trolls the Foolish Dissidents...
Foolish Dissidents
an example from communitychannel (Natalie) on Youtube, responding to a racist message on her forum with a vulnerable and honest acknowledgement of her irritation, in good humour
By "Foolish Dissidents," I mean that these specific sorts of trolls are usually individuals or a set of individuals who seem to genuinely believe that they are engaging in substantive discussions, making worthwhile contributions to an ongoing debate about this or that topic. I call them such, because they are often contrary, and typically blind to their own logical or dialectical shortcomings, or else, just as typically, blind to how their views (and/or the ways that their views are articulated) are irresponsible abuses of privilege.
It is here that I bump into a sort of existential conundrum... How Do I Deal WIth These Foolish Dissidents?
On the one hand, I follow the calling of the Buddhist teaching: That all beings are suffering, and that the proper response to others' sufferings is to cultivate wisdom and apply wisdom in compassionate service.
And this call truly does extend to include ALL Beings, including the Trolls themselves. Trolls, assuming they are not Bots, are just as human as anyone else... but I designate them as simply more suffused with a certain brand of ignorance. What are the rightful expedient means to dispel their ignorance, thus liberating them from their suffering?
But then I bump up into that next part of the conundrum:
Who am I to Educate them? Who are they and who am I in the larger scheme of things? Online forums are but blips in the entire corpus of human history's addiction to Conversation and Dialogue, Dissidence and Demagoguery...
By all this I mean that I come up against the need to monitor MY own trollish-ness... MY own exaggerated claims to moral superiority or secret knowledge. My own hubris, my own propensity to abuse privilege... in short: My own suffering.
What is the 'correct' response then?
Of course it varies from circumstance to circumstance, forum to forum, troll to troll, topic to topic. There are sometimes even gems of wisdom that peek out underneath the smatterings of rhetorical waste that some Foolish Dissidents spew. I can begin by looking for these gems, to honour what it may be that may have been their intent underlying their garbage. The other aspect is to also make a certain distinction, what illdoc1 calls the "What they Said/Did" conversation and the "What they Are" conversation (which he talks about in the context of challenging racist speech).
As he puts it, "those are two totally different conversations, and you need to make sure that you pick the right one." And of course, he is advocating that, in most circumstances, the right conversation to have is the conversation about What They Said/Did, without necessarily extrapolating FROM that around WHO THEY ARE. This, after all, would be allowing myself to become that Foolish Dissident myself.
These conversations are not easy; they rarely are.
But with some skill, an adroit use of humour / developmentally appropriate language to engage all in the forum (not least of whom the troll(s) him/her/themselves), a healthy moderation of my own ego's propensity to over-exaggerate the worth of my own voice in the context of a heated conversation, and ultimately, of course, compassion and forgiveness for all involved (including myself for those times that I have failed to live up to my heightened expectations of spiritual servitude)...
...perhaps I can catalyse at least THIS beginning dialogue into how to be a responsible citizen of cyberspace.
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