You wanna talk trolls?

Nov 12, 2007 18:37

Yeah...

Let's talk about trolls.

If you can read this article (thoughtfully supplied by kyburg) without wanting to go out and burn someone's house down, then you're a bigger person than I am.

It's hard enough to think about kids doing this to each other. It's harder to think about grown-ups doing it to children.

But the hardest thing to think about is that the courts, in my opinion, literally endorsed this behavior by saying that they couldn't determine whether or not the action was the actual cause of the child's death.

Um...are they stupid or what?



I know the kid was 13. I know that she had a history of being troubled. I know that she had no business being on MySpace, no matter how closely she was monitored or how deeply her parents were involved, because MySpace is for folks who are 14 and up...

My question is--who cares?

What difference does it make?

Are people who are mentally unstable not supposed to interact on the internet?

If that were the case, half of us wouldn't be here because you can't swing a dead cat on Live Journal without hitting a diagnosis. The sound of crickets would fall over this space in about three seconds if the only people allowed here were the ones who were emotionally stable.

So no--you're not going to be allowed to sit back and judge this little girl because she had a history of issues.

Nor are you allowed to judge her parents, because they were being responsible. It just never entered their heads that anyone could possibly be this unutterably hateful just because they had anonymity to use as a coward's shield. Nor could they get their minds around the idea that their little girl could possibly be the victim of her own neighbors, who were grown-ups and had therefore years and years of practice, honing their skills as scum-sucking sleazeballs far beyond the ability of the children under their influence, but still using that influence to encourage that hellish behavior in those they were charged to nurture and groom in the ways of the adult world.

How in the world could her parents possibly know that their daughter lived in a world where these kind of monsters resided in the next block, and even had the FACE to ask favors of those they intended to ruin? What kind of people would they have to be to imagine such a thing?

As it was, they were decent people who cared about their daughter and lived a normal life, where people are good and the world was safe, and where they took measures to keep their daughter's life good and safe--so no, you don't get to judge them, either, just because they were too naive to know what filth lived around them.

No--you don't get to judge.

Because you know, it doesn't matter that this child was ill-equipped to deal with the cruelty of other people--because it isn't her fault.

The fault lies in the hearts of those who were cruel to her, and nowhere else.

WHY do any of us just take it for granted that in order to go online we have to build some carapace of reciprocal meanness in order to survive? WHY are we not utterly outraged when people decide that it's totally OK to decimate someone emotionally online, just because we're online? WHY do we so easily assume the "if it's too hot for you, get out of the kitchen" attitude instead of screaming in indignation at the people who troll the internet with the sole purpose of tearing other people to shreds?

WHY do we cheer each other on in our cruelty? Why do we get the "FTW!!!!!" when we reach new lows in the coliseum of snark?

Why is it OK to be so unbelievably cruel, often to strangers, when we have no idea whether or not that person off whom we lobbed our latest clever meanness is looking at that belt--or those pills, or that gun, or that razor--needing nothing more than one small excuse to use it?

I call bullshit.

I call bullshit on the concept that no one can be hurt on the internet. I call bullshit on the idea that if someone kills themselves because someone took that hurt to an all too tender heart, it's their own fault.

I call bullshit on every single person who feels like they can say whatever they want to whomever they want and if something terrible happens, oh, well, sucks to be you.

My heart bleeds for this little girl.

You know why?

Because I've been there.

And if it weren't for a friend in NY talking to me on the phone until I fell asleep, and who listened to me cry, then who knows who would have found me hanging in the closet by my belt?

No, my friend listened, and talked, and got me the hell offline that night while the crowd still raged on and told me I should just go ahead and off myself because who needs a little drama whore around anyway...?

And I thank him for it, because as baffled as he was by it, he knew that what I was feeling and thinking was real, and knew the danger of trying to invalidate it by telling me that it was "only the internet".

I've come a long way since then.

Some of the ways I've changed make me scared.

Because, you know, I've reached the point where nobody can hurt me online. Really. Seriously. And I don't know if we all should feel so jolly about that because, in order for me (or anyone else) to accomplish that, what needs to happen is that I have to decrease your importance in my life. I have to undermine what friendship I feel for you, or your validity as a person, as well as my respect for the way you think and feel--in essence, I have to gut you of your humanity--in order for me to fearlessly interact with you, confident that you cannot harm me.

Because cruelty and insensitivity is the heart and soul of online interaction, I have to gird myself with apathy in order to cope with your "freedom of speech", thereby depriving both you and myself of my ability to really and truly connect with you.

The upside of this is that I know that there are some people out there who are so impeccably polite, and sensitive to other people's feelings, and for whom speaking Klingon would feel more comfortable than speaking slander and ad hominem and cruelty--that I don't have to worry about them, and I can connect.

Those people generally reside on my friend's list.

But the point is this--

If we cannot trust people online to behave at least as politely as we expect people to behave in society (which is only marginally polite at best--it's not a particularly high standard to expect, really), then what hope can there possibly be that this box will become any sort of positive thing?

When this box can and has been used as a murder weapon, by so called "normal" adults against a sad little girl, and society washes its hands of that and tries to blame either her or her parents for it, then what, really, are we here for?

I know I'm here a lot. I know that I use this place as often as anyone here, and MORE often than many. I know that I find a great deal of enjoyment here....

And sometimes I'm terrified that all those things are true.

The best I can do is to disengage from that, and encourage you to that end as well and disallow it in your space, and refuse to indulge it in others as much as it would repulse you in yourself.

Responsible expression is the right of every human being.

I have to keep reminding myself of that when I read stuff like this, because it will ever be that in among the responsible, and the sweet, and the uplifting and the encouraging....

There are monsters among us.

They live in the next block.

internet, rant, op ed

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