Know Your Meme: The Fine Art of Trolling

This past weekend, we attended a surprise party for one of our friend's 30th birthday. We had a great time eating grillables, drinking and joking around. It was between those last two things that one of the revelers started to try to get Colin's rage on. The problem with this is that Colin doesn't really get his rage on. Ever. He's pretty reserved, he just starts to look uncomfortable and awkward. When it got to that, I asked the guy to ease up on him a little, and he replied "I'm just building up his troll resistance!"

'Trolling' is the term coined by the internets for the act of saying or doing something online to cause some emotional response, drama or controversy. The psychology alone behind trolling is profound - there are actually published studies on this stuff.

Allow me to get deep for a moment, if you will...

Basically, we act as human beings within a larger social context. This is made up of everything from where and when we grew up to the family we may or may not have, our economic standing to our sense of self. Our interactions with other people, what we can and can't do, say and sometimes feel, and our own internal thought processes are shaped, in no small part, by these social cues and mores.

It is when these things are removed from the overall social interaction equation that things start to get interesting. Think of it: the internet, for most intents and purposes, is anonymous. Sure, there are ways to track people down, but most people don't have the knowledge and means to do so. Even people with the knowledge and means to do so usually will be put off by just how much of a pain in the ass it can turn out to be. Some places on the web make this anonymity very easy, if not the standard, way to communicate with everyone else on the site. (Warning - Those links may or may not be NSFW, and will more likely than not cause your brain to leak out your nose if you spend too much time on them... You've been warned...)

In other words, you don't *have* to be you. You can be a smarter, wiser, wittier you; well, as much as your own intelligence will allow. Definitions of economic stature fades; while it's assumed you have something since you're seated at a computer with an internet connection, there's not much more that can be garnered about you that you don't volunteer. No one needs to know your name, your weight or size, the clothes you wear, your religious or spiritual views, who you're related to, who you know or who your friends are - and you most certainly don't have to let on to anything. You don't even have to be honest about it. It's amazing what can happen to confidence levels when you're just as likely to be a fat slob as a gorgeous knockout. Take this from a guy who played as a catgirl in an online video game for over six years.

And it's this absence of social context and relative anonymity that promote more uninhibited social behavior. People say and do things online that they'd never do in real life. Combine this with the innate desire for entertainment and an active and, many times, all-to-willing audience to respond in an equally uninhibited manner, and you have a perfect storm for trolling.

Once a troll has been recognized for what it is, the drama is sometimes continued by the person countering the original troll with an attempt of their own. This usually leads to a situation where the original topic is completely derailed, causing much rage on the part of the people who actually wanted to discuss the topic while the trolls go back and forth between themselves.

Welcome to The Internets. Check your sanity at the door and take a seat, please.

In the end, it was all in fun, though. Once Colin was on to our friend, and a conciliatory fist bump was had, it was game on between the two for the rest of the evening.