Behind the Scenes
Internet Depersonalization Goes Both Ways
It has taken me a long time to write this, even though I’ve known the whole time what I wanted to say. But there is a story, and there is the reason I want to tell the story, and it is hard to figure out how to make the second one, the reason, count more, both for me and for whoever reads this.
Also, the story involves someone whom people know. Someone I’ve met once, but who I have something like 75 
facebook friends in common with. By comparison, my best friend of 25 years and I share only 53 mutual friends. So, there’s this question of whether to say who the someone is. This goes back to the earlier point–it isn’t important who, in terms of why I want to tell this story. I’m not telling this story to call someone out. So, don’t say who it is, right? But then what if people think it is someone who it isn’t, and have resulting feelings about the wrong person? Maybe I should turn comments off? But I don’t want to turn comments off. Not yet. I would like there to be a discussion about what I’m trying to say, but not about who I am talking about. So, please, don’t try to guess; if you do I’ll flag the comment for Blake to delete.
So. Mean Week 2009 was less than a week into when I started writing for HTMLGiant. I hadn’t read it super regularly, and I
wasn’t sure what Mean Week was supposed to be, and I did it really wrong and felt really bad feelings. The worst feeling I had came from a horrible, virulently misogynist, hateful, anonymous comment in the form of a beyond-degrading epithet directed toward me. Anonymous meaning the person identified himself by his first name but there was no link attached or anything indicating who the person really was. (See why I am reluctant even NOT to say who it is? By this unspecific description, you might think you know who it is. Like, Jereme Dean uses his first name with no link, and if you didn’t know that I’ve never met Jereme even once, you could think it is him. But it is not. To my knowledge Jereme is not hateful even if he disagrees with people a lot.)
Whatever Mean Week is, this comment was beyond. It isn’t called Hate Week.
Again, this was early in my tenure here. I didn’t know the game. I don’t have a thick skin. I’ve always been called sensitive, as if it is a bad thing, and certainly there is this idea that I shouldn’t let things like this get to me, not on the internet, not on HTMLG, certainly not on Mean Week. I disagree. Sure, it may have negative effects on me, but I think it is dangerous to disregard hatefulness. This is why I am telling the story.
Of course, though it affected me and made me cry, I had to somehow get past it, and the way I did this (I thought) was to reason
that the person didn’t know me, and didn’t really think of me as a person. Like, in response to another nasty comment directed toward me by someone else, Blake commented (for which I thank him), “would you say this to her face?” This made me feel better about both commenters. They just see my name and don’t really think about that name being attached to a real person with real feelings. They couldn’t.
I still think that’s true. But here’s the twist: Six months later, I met the person who made the hate comment, and, apologetically, he identified himself as the commenter, and said it wasn’t really about me, or something, and he was sorry.
I didn’t remember the anonymous first name by that time, until he repeated exactly what he’d said. But there’s a catch: he didn’t know I didn’t remember. On some level, I wish he hadn’t reminded me of it. After we spoke, I felt awful. For days. Worse than I’d felt when I read the comment.
Why? I will tell you why. It’s because I hadn’t thought of him as a person, either, when he made the comment. I didn’t truly feel on a gut level that an actual person was saying this actually hateful thing to me for no reason. A person with friends who are also my friends, who maybe writes things I would like, who has other nice qualities and isn’t usually so hateful. I was upset by the original comment, but it was much worse to find out for sure that the sayer was real. So, it goes both ways. When he met me, I became real, and he probably did feel some real remorse.
At the same moment, he became real to me, and that’s what hurt me, too. So it hit me hard when he repeated the epithet aloud, even though it was couched in apology.
It goes both ways. This scares me, somehow. Because I don’t want to develop a thick skin. Even my actual dermis is thin, soft, highly reactive. This causes problems, sure, like redness and burning, but at the risk of sounding pretty squishy, I don’t want different skin: I trust it, and trust that the burning is saying, beware.
I don’t feel totally safe in this world. I don’t think the internet is safe. Walls can come down. In this instance, I didn’t feel any threat beyond the emotional/psychological, but again, this is about more than this instance. I need to not depersonalize commenters. If I go around thinking they are bots who have no volition, then I put my guard down, as if the person couldn’t act on the same hate that led them to say what they said, and this unguardedness could put me at risk, emotionally, psychologically, physically. Maybe it’s a joke, and in this case I guess it was somehow meant to be one. Perhaps this person even felt something entirely different than internet personalization: perhaps he felt like he knew me (a feeling that social networking and blogging can infer falsely), and figured I would somehow know him and know that it wasn’t meant as hate.
But other times, it is no joke. I’m not trying to sound alarmist; in some ways I’m expressing an intellectual interest, a finding, as I’ve never heard this talked about, that we un-anonymous contributors might also shield ourselves (flimsily) by not thinking of the anonymous commenters as real. They wouldn’t say it to our faces, and we don’t really hear it when it’s not to our face, either. Maybe that’s a good thing. It might have been in this case if I’d never met the commenter. But I did meet him, and it frightened me that I hadn’t truly realized he was a person. So, beware, all of you. [Insert dramatic music. But really. Beware.]
Tags: anonymous commenting
Yikes, Amy. Sounds like a terrible yet informative experience. Also, I think it’s a good thing to be sensitive.
How many people – right now – are searching Mean Week ’09?
I’m glad you posted this. I hadn’t really thought about the fact that I depersonalize back. I think you’re right that this is an issue — but isn’t that the point for the trolls? Because they feel anonymous beyond an IP address and a fake name (or first name unlinked, or whatever), it’s easy for them to be assholes? Like it’s their job to be a big collective asshole to remind All Us Individuals Stupid Enough to be Persons on the Internet that there is evil in the world?
Also, your paragraphs are the perfect lengths for readability.
Thanks for this post, Amy. There’s something very easy and alluring in how the internet allows individuals to become representative objects. We’re essentially given a few facts about a person and allowed to create the rest. Take someone who maybe resents a certain type of individual (man or woman or person-in-power or attractive person or talented person) and then present an example of that person, and you’ve got an easy recipe to make an individual into a representative example. When all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a plywood anchor. Anyway it goes both ways; I get almost as weirded out when the representative projection is positive. (Not quite as weirded out — all this garbage is why I pay an extra $20/yr to keep all my WHOIS data private) This is linked to the problem I have with Women Writers as a homogeneous group possessing similar facial features and artistic aims and surely synced up menses. Maybe we’d solve more problems if we let a little more doubt into the equation.
i just went back through her old posts, back to ’09. i was way too curious not to try. couldn’t find anything though.
trollz
Great post, Amy. It is very easy to depersonalize commenters, especially when they say vicious things. I find it disturbing to consider that a real, flesh and blood person is on the other side of that anonymity.
I think you’re absolutely right, Amy. I see it slightly differently, not merely as an internet phenomena, but the kind of distance lent by any media apparatus or social camouflage, we’re supposed to get this kind of shit out of us by the end of high school. Remember when a group of you might be disagreeing with one member of a group, and gang mentality takes over? When, from the back, the dudes unseen will say some of the nastiest things, or another friend might mutter the worst of their comments in proximity to you but not intended for you? I think we’re so used to the opportunism made by the ability to make anonymous comments, that we fall prey to accepting that the forum by nature allows such commenters to exist, and will express themselves. Some people discuss things on websites like this for the chance to express themselves, then there are some who come along and abuse the nature of the forum to make themselves feel better. I think you’re right, Amy, that we don’t outright condemn it. Those of us who want to have a simple discussion, why do we abide this behaviour and feel self-conscious for not participating in the vulgar cynicism? There are some on here for example, like Justin Taylor in the past, who you’ll notice never entertain the cynical trollism, and make it clear they’re not interested in their mortifying seriousness or earnestness on a subject. Even though we’re all in on the joke during mean week, perhaps it satisfies too easily the abusive low self-esteems of trolls to say whatever stupid shit they’re too piss-weak to say to someone’s face? I woul say though, Amy, that given the nature of the forum, and the impossibility of defending the quality of conversation in the open format of a blog, perhaps we also need to find a way to, rather than toughening up, make a distinction and ignore the meaning entirely of anonymous trolls, that their comments are but spam and make unacceptable opportunities of a forum meant for open participation.
I’m with you on also being a little disturbed by the positive. I have had a lot of situations where I can’t understand why someone wanted to be my friend really soon after meeting me, on so little knowledge. These same people, often, way into our friendship (which I usually accept; I’m not good at turning down friendships), proclaim me to be just like them in some respect, when I’m not. I’m a good listener, which some people take as agreement with whatever they are saying, I guess. All these are real-life examples; like you said, it happens even easier on the internet.
I’m with you on also being a little disturbed by the positive. I have had a lot of situations where I can’t understand why someone wanted to be my friend really soon after meeting me, on so little knowledge. These same people, often, way into our friendship (which I usually accept; I’m not good at turning down friendships), proclaim me to be just like them in some respect, when I’m not. I’m a good listener, which some people take as agreement with whatever they are saying, I guess. All these are real-life examples; like you said, it happens even easier on the internet.
Thanks Adam. And I think you are right that it is easy for them to be assholes. And if we think of them that way, instead of as people making choices, who might actually not beat their girlfriends, then maybe they succeed. Even the word, troll, makes them seem not like a person but like an imaginary creature.
Thanks, Corey. Part of what I’m trying to say, though, is that I think it’s dangerous to see troll comments as spam. There is something very insidious in the belief that evil has no face.
I also think we have to guard against too often writing anonymous commenting off as weak, cowardly, immature, or coming out of low self-esteem. Sure, that is often part of it, and sometimes might be the whole story. But the problem is, they know who I am. Sometimes, threats are anonymous so you don’t see it coming when it arrives in the flesh. Again, I don’t mean to be alarmist, but I also think hate is more than just low self-esteem, and must be taken more seriously than just “mark as spam,” which is a response to a machine, not a person. Our own cognitive dissonance toward these commenters might well encourage theirs.
But if the comment bears no weight but nastiness, then exposing its paucity of meaning is the most effective thing you can do, that and denouncing it as such. Otherwise, on the one hand entertaining the cynicism, and on the other defending yourself against it, bolsters precisely their provocation, excites them that they got under your skin. I think we need to do more of what you are herein doing, declaring its repugnance. However, the openness of this kind of forum cannot deny the shouting from the bleachers that will inevitably go on. The blog and the internet allow someone from great distances away to have a stab at you, and by making yourself public as you do as a writer and bloggist, you are nothing but a soapboxer on a busy main street, a clutch might properly engage around you, most will walk past, and some will swear, throw fruit, or even chuck a beer can at you. For me, other than this productive denunciation, Amy, I see the only solution as closing commenting for a particular blogpost. Be print media, where one has to do their own exposure and making-public to voice their criticism of you. Do you see what I mean? I must reiterate that by making yourself public, like a politician, you will be entertaining hatespeak and defamation much of the time. Do we have a successful model in our present media lives, where discursive participation is successfully entered into only by those with the discourse, not the soapbox or the audience, in mind?
Never had the issue online, only in the classroom when a student had written an essay with a lot of hate speech that I then called him out on in written comments on his essay right above his “F.” Problem was I still road the campus buses home, and so did he. He ended up following me home and getting off at my stop and confronting me about his paper, yelling at the top of his lungs that he wasn’t racist or sexist.
I was bigger than him. I was taller than him. But it still scared the hell out of me. It’s scary. And I don’t envy anyone who has to confront the person behind those comments when the walls come down.
Maybe Mean Week itself exacerbates the problem around here. Maybe it’s time to get rid of Mean Week.
It’s a subtle but real gradation: mean ha ha, mean obnoxious, spasms of rage – and real hate, concerted, would-be murderous hate.
But, Amy, have you really never heard vitriolic rancor spoken “to your face”? It may be that you’re an unusually gentle person ‘in person’, and it might be that most people who’d bother to read and post at a literary internet site are less likely to talk shit face to face, but there shouldn’t be any reasonable doubt, even in a sheltered life, that there are lots of people who will start shit vocally face to face for more (apparently) trivial reasons than even protecting one’s intellectual ego, which is often the flashpoint at HTMLG, as it is in a university department or, indeed, over a chess board.
I don’t recall, of the regrettable things I’ve said online, remarking directly to another poster anything I wouldn’t say face-to-face in a moment of similar provocation, and I’ve not read even unprovoked hostility on the internet – from rougher commenters here, say – that I didn’t suppose came from a “real person” – like the hostile or unkind people one encounters almost every time one leaves the house (or, unhappily for some, every time one doesn’t leave the house). Do you drive, Amy? – most people are pretty reasonable, even generous — but wow! there’s some sociopathic drivers, too. And when we talk of intellectual and artistic ambition, we talk of a chance-taking that feels far more vulnerable than just the disinterested physics problem of getting from ‘here’ to ‘there’. I mean that the power trip of risking an opinion or exposing a perspective can seem more vital than taking one’s turn at a four-way stop.
Look at how some of the comments already on this thread refer to “assholes” and “trolls” – why, everybody knows what they are! Sadly for me, I’m not that socially adept. Often when I hear (I mean in meatspace) someone calling someone else – present or not – an “asshole”, I think, ‘What “asshole”? Who’re you, skippy?’ – even though I also call lots of people ‘assholes’. Try as you might, unless you’re a saint, you don’t follow all your own ‘rules’.
And what is internet “trolling”, exactly? I take it to mean ‘commenting exclusively to agitate anger or distress’. Well, what upsets someone? or makes them angry? Sometimes it’s predatory viciousness, sure, that bugs me a lot. But doesn’t it also enrage people to have implausible links in their arguments pointed out to them – in even the gentlest language? Don’t people find it unbearably unconstructive to have laziness in their thinking shown to them – even without a hard-to-resist japing tone? I think much of the anti-troll trolling is just institutional politicking, of the same order as crowd-sourcing and clique formation.
Serious question: in warning your readers to beware of not realizing that it’s real people who post remarks on the internet, what action are you recommending your readers take? not to retaliate when one is sneered at? I mean that (I think) it’s likely that people – maybe not you! – who don’t “realize” that other commenters are real people don’t realize that real people are real, either.
I’m not sure what in my post indicated that I had never heard vitriolic rancor to my face. That certainly isn’t what I meant to imply in saying that in many cases, these anonymous commenters wouldn’t say the same thing to someone’s face. Doesn’t mean never. But certainly, I’ve gotten a lot more of that in the internet world than in the flesh.
All I’m advocating is awareness. Beware. Be aware. Don’t tell yourself safe fictions about anyone you deal with, or anyone else for that matter. Do the imaginative work of realizing that any words come from a whole real person. Certainly, this can happen away from the internet, as I mentioned in response to Amelia’s comment, where people see what they want to see in a person.
It doesn’t seem like there’s much more to do than be honest, it’s up to the commenter to give a shit on discovering they’d hurt someone by their comment. Hypothetically, if one wanted to utterly defame someone anonymously they could do so as a fictional entity. It’s worth then reiterating I suppose that you are a real person then, at least wanton attackers uncertain about the harm they do (whom seem to be the kind of commenters you’re exposing here) could then understand. I really don’t see any action possible to be taken otherwise, except if one wishes to express themselves without the heckling one should publish in media that is not open to anonymous commenting.
As cynical as Corey’s last sentence is, I think its quite true. The cultures that we’ve been born into have had hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years of accumulated social custom and convention that, ultimately, emotionally insulate us to greater or lesser degrees. The internet has had none of that. A certain degree of cynicism, skepticism and thick skin are essential to navigating the internet, with its hordes of spam, scams and trolls.
Amy, you say that we should be “aware,” but I don’t see what that would get us besides needless emotional or mental anguish.
Dear Amy:
Really? Almost two years later? Mean week is like carnival, full of masks and things turned on their heads. If you’re a big shot, or super popular, you get picked on. And if you’re a nobody, you’ve got to be careful because everyone’s throwing punches. It’s like a huge literary mosh pit. If you don’t want to enter it, sit back, watch, have fun watching!
But, don’t get rid of it. I like Mean Week. I miss it already. I hope your post is not used to do away with it.
However, let me also say this: whoever said what they said to you during Mean Week 2009 is an asshole for apologizing so late and, furthermore, for only apologizing, it seems, in order to further their “literary career,” be part of your reading series. Truly an asshole move.
One more thing: ridicule, laughter, YES. Hurtful, hateful stuff, NO.
Sincerely,
Janey Smith (who is not a real person)
hi amy, i’m glad you posted this. i wonder if the problem is less depersonalization and more homogenization like of attitudes, values, ethics, morals, etc. meaning that we sometimes expect others to behave the way we would (like some comments above, ‘i wouldn’t say anything online that i wouldn’t say to your face,’ well no, maybe you wouldn’t, but someone else might?) and it’s a natural instinct but it’s unrealistic.
‘mark as spam’ or ignoring these types of comments is problematic because what feels hateful to you can truly be someone else’s idea of a joke (though i am sure there are examples that everyone would agree constitute downright hate, i’m definitely not saying yours wasn’t one of them.) so if this is to be an open forum, where do you draw the line? the problem with everyone having a voice is precisely that EVERYONE has a voice.
so i like your approach of talking about it as a way to make others aware that hey, that was hurtful to me. but the other problem with that is that it can be misinterpreted as weakness. you may be sensitive but–and i can only go on what i see of your posts and comments here–i’ve never gotten the feeling that you were weak and i actually had you down as fairly thick-skinned, i felt like you must be, to be able to post on htmlg.
i think i like the way jimmy sometimes handles hateful comments (and he’s had his share!) he engages but in such a genuine, thoughtful, feeling way that has a very disarming effect and sometimes, i guess when he’s in a good mood, he throws in some jokes. (jimmy are you there? is this an accurate assessment, or what is your ‘philosophy’ to deal?)
on a small tangent, i think mean week was awesome in the beginning because it allowed the smaller, original group to vent and it was usually done in creative, constructive ways. maybe and unfortunately that is not a good idea now that the site has grown so much?
The symbolic violence you address is real and has real consequences. But the combination of anonymity and shared experience in large cities can lull one into a false sense of security. Atlanta is far more dangerous than the Internet.
It is always great to read stuff like this.
If I weren’t living in some stupid boring town these days, if I hadn’t moved away from all my friends over on the east coast, I doubt I’d’ve ever started commenting on this site, for the sole reason that 10 years of LJ use has only taught me just how fucking flawed communication by the internet is. Not to say it can’t be a great way to meet people, but lots of people on here, the internet in general, they’re not the same people you meet in person, they choose to be these fucking “characters” online that they’d never have the balls to be anywhere else.
Like, shit, all you guys seem really nice and thoughtful, and I wouldn’t mind meeting you and all that, but until we’ve sat in a room with only ourselves and maybe some drugs as our only sources of entertainment… you get what I’m saying, right? This stuff is deceptive and intimidating and mean when real life really isn’t that bad.
And for me at least, the positivity / connectedness of the Internet outweighs the negativity / anonynimity.
Amy: This is really great. And this – “They wouldn’t say it to our faces, and we don’t really hear it when it’s not to our face, either.’ – has me thinking a lot. I agree with Deadgod completely that “much of the anti-troll trolling is just institutional politicking, of the same order as crowd-sourcing and clique formation.” Elegantly expressed as ever. And it’s true that an appeal to anti-trolling is often a way of shutting down people who speak without having to answer to a provocation you’ve put out to them: because it seems like a post can’t troll, only a response in the comments can troll, it’s easy to assert authority over trolling by claiming it has hijacked your space with its tirade. But what makes the troll so specifically irksome and provocative can be found in something else Deadgod says: “Often when I hear (I mean in meatspace) someone calling someone else – present or not – an “asshole”, I think, ‘What “asshole”? Who’re you, skippy?’ – even though I also call lots of people ‘assholes’.” I know just what he means when he says this. Yet where Deadgod is speaking of a sort of instinctive interrogative feeling born out of how the use of a word like “asshole” (or “troll”) tries to interpellate us into a certain attitude toward a person, the troll interpellates the person into the attitude. It’s not only that trollish comments or posts tempt one to respond in kind but that they seem almost always to impute the most pathetic and disgusting motive or version of yourself to you, like they’ve divined something in your writing that’s more inside you than yourself. Trolls hit out at your own sense of self-loathing by sneerily goading you not to show yourself but by leaping ahead, in advance, and saying you already have. Snark, I’m realizing from your post, is the mix of the most intimate slander with a depersonalization of motive, which is to say, a sense of ‘nothing personal’ that is both true to the position – because it doesn’t know you – and false – because it operates on the juicy claim that it can see right through you. And in that sense, even real people are carefully avoiding being real people when they’re snarky. Snark is not about being a real person who advances a symbolic attack on someone on the basis of some expressed greivance about them – like hate speech – but about savaging a person as a representative of self-serving hypocrisy, a sort of cultural fakery that can only be met by the “real” of the most shittiest comments, so as to “expose” its double standard – to make yourself something more than a real person, pursuing your specific testiness, whims, or hates, but a defrender of the “real person”, precisely in your anonymity, or your outsider status to the forum at which you’re posting. A taste of the real world! Look at Palin: today’s very definition in the wider media sphere of a troll and of snark. She thrives on saying what she doesn’t mean as a means of meaning what she doesn’t say. Like “blood libel”. It didn’t have any relationship to the anti-Semitic history it refers to (which one assumes Palin knows little to nothing about: it’s just a ‘phrase’ she picked up) and yet, as a motive imputed to the Left, it absolutely implies an antagonism toward the Right analogous only with anti-Semitism. Trolling is an unseemly pseudo-intimacy that baits you with the fact that it doesn’t know the truth of you but says what it says as if everything about you were so obvious and worth shit.
vipstores.net )
Thanks so much for this post. I know, I know, I keep repeating what others are saying–but it’s true. I always forget when someone walks away from some nastyass post that they’re real, too.
Mean Week, I think, is a great idea – so long as people aren’t mean for the sake of mean and mean for the sake of thoughtful discussion. I’ve always been a reader and never, ever one to comment — as I am actually a bit timid about people online trolling around as bullies. I got over it. I think. Thanks, Amy.
THOSE PARAGRAPHS ARE SO WELL-LENGTHED THAT ZZZZZZIPPP READ THIS POST BY ACCIDENT
Amy, I’m sorry this happened, but glad you wrote about it here.
Grow a pair. Baby
That rhetorical question was provoked by what I take to be your surprise as well as your distress at that “horrible, virulently misogynist, hateful, anonymous comment in the form of a beyond-degrading epithet directed towards” you.
I agree that ‘awareness that words come from people as real as oneself’ is an appropriate condition to demand of oneself generally.
Surprise, no. I’d already been compared to Goebbels earlier in the week, as “eric” so thoughtfully reminds me. distress? not sure. but yes, the comment incurred bad feelings. not new ones. i’m not very interested in being desensitized, nor am I seemingly able to be. If you punch me in the face, it’s going to hurt even if I got punched 100 times before. It’ll probably hurt worse.
I entertain elaborate revenge fantasies when people shit talk me. It usually involves releasing all of the commenter’s blood from their body as slowly as possible then drinking it in front of whatever family members of theirs I can round up. That or taking a bath in it. You know, whatever.
in the words of the rolling stones, some comments get under your skin.
“Like it’s their job to be a big collective asshole to remind All Us Individuals Stupid Enough to be Persons on the Internet that there is evil in the world?”
Seems true to an extent. imho, not all trolls can or should be made into scapegoats so easily. Some trolls have an aesthetic sense about themselves as unreliable narrators that hints at something more than the desire to be cruel. One part of this sense, I think, might be a desire to keep people vigilant, both on and off the internet. A lot of trolls knowingly clown out the darker sides of the internet, often from an ironic distance, in order to help illuminate the technology for what it is. To illuminate the fucked up subjectivities it produces. Parodying the darker subjectivities on the internet so as to make sure they don’t appear in our blind spots or sneak up on us elsewhere. A defensive tactic against IRL predators?
I’m not trying to defend the actions of the person you’re talking about in this article, Amy, but I’m interested in getting at ideas that might lead toward insight, empathy 4 troll subject positions (hehe) and resolution rather than further depersonalization mud slinging. Trolls cum69 in all shapes and sizes and with different levels of humorlessness, humor, satirical/parodic impulses and alienation (etc.) influencing them. Trolling as a defiant faceless response to identitarian authorship practices. This: “I think much of the anti-troll trolling is just institutional politicking, of the same order as crowd-sourcing and clique formation.” Connotations of security/surveillance culture. Wu Ming as one literary example in this trajectory http://www.nodo50.org/utopiaforo/imaxes/wuming.jpg? Trolling as a tragic, fucked up, systemic side effect of long periods of isolation spent on the internet. Trolling as neo-dadaism. The dadaists were an early incarnation of pre-internet trolling, no? What is Duchamp’s fountain other than ultimate IRL trolling against art galleries? Trolling as an aesthetic response to the falseness of naive internet realism [paging Christopher Higgs to the thread or something]. And so on.
In short, a lot of trolling is performative.
On the other hand, trolling just to be straight up vile and cruel to someone is shitty, yeah. All the more reason for it to be satirized?
An ethnographic study of trolling would be cool. Seems challenging. The ethnographer would probably get trolled hard to the point of being unable to complete the study and experience some kind of existential crisis about internet communications.
“All I’m advocating is awareness. Beware. Be aware. Don’t tell yourself safe fictions about anyone you deal with, or anyone else for that matter. Do the imaginative work of realizing that any words come from a whole real person.”
have you seen the movie Catfish?
@amy
I apologize in advance for any perceived ill-will, given my directness, but I’m having some trouble with what you’ve written:
“I don’t want to develop a thick skin.”
Why not? especially when it almost certainly solve the apparent problem you describe directly afterwards:
“I don’t think the internet is safe. Walls can come down. In this instance, I didn’t feel any threat beyond the emotional/psychological, but again, this is about more than this instance. I need to not depersonalize commenters. If I go around thinking they are bots who have no volition, then I put my guard down, as if the person couldn’t act on the same hate that led them to say what they said, and this unguardedness could put me at risk, emotionally, psychologically, physically.”
Granted, I have a vested interested in ‘hiding’ behind an anonymous pseudonym when posting here, but I don’t see what your post really gets at other than: I got my feelings hurt by someone said online by taking a shock-comment personally, and it disturbs me that another human being lacked the empathy to realize I would be affected as such.
When speaking from a public platform, what you say isn’t always about you and your words. It’s more often than not about the people listening and responding to your message. So when I see you write: “So, beware, all of you.” I think: Why should we? We don’t have your soapbox.
There’s a rich tradition and history to anonymity in literature (The Federalist Papers’ Publius comes to mind, as does China’s short-lived Democracy Wall in the 1970s, hell, even those cyberpunk Anonymous pranksters tend to know what they’re doing with the written word: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/05/941505/-Anonymous-concedes-defeat), so maybe all I’m really saying is, I guess, consider the ones who wield anonymity wisely and for a purpose, you know, the grown-ups.
I suspended my facebook three months ago because I felt like it ceased to be a tool for me, like it was imposing itself on my life. with 1100 “friends” it felt as if I didn’t have any, although I was bound to reading updates about people’s pets, pictures of ex-lovers, and harrowing reports concerning existential crises. I came to realize I don’t actually know any of these people, as I live so far away from them, that I can actually choose how I interact with the internet and the people on it. The problem for me on the internet is that it leads to a kind of emotional adhdness. Checking to see if anyone has commented or email you 30 times a day, the instant gratification of online social interaction or mini-depression of no new messages in your inbox, is I think bad. I was suffering from that. I’ve tried to regiment my email checking and commenting and internet life so that I can separate that life from my real one, the one which I actually engage with the physical world. I don’t know what to make of that division, as it is continually becoming more blurred. I remember in the early 00’s that the internet was more geek oriented, that it seemed like a place where people in the “know” could come together, that most people could only interact via AOL or AIM. Now that it’s a populist medium, it kind of lost its previous appeal to me. That may make me some kind of curmudgeon elitist, but that’s the way I feel.
vipstores.net
true story: when i de-friended everyone i had on my fb account and closed it, my mom thought i had died.
LOL.
deadgod, I’ve never understood why the fuck you post anonymously. Seriously. You don’t have anything to hide, you typically show yourself to be a thousand times smarter than other people here.
True as fuck, this: “But doesn’t it also enrage people to have implausible links in their arguments pointed out to them – in even the gentlest language? Don’t people find it unbearably unconstructive to have laziness in their thinking shown to them – even without a hard-to-resist japing tone?”
That first sentence — I feel like this is why that incessantly limp-wristed “stephen” character out of Chicago and other bandwagoneers get the privilege — the privilege! — of referring to me as a “troll.”
In their book, it seems, anyone who writes anything other than “sweet” or “amazing” or similarly ridiculously, baseless, fluffy, panzified, boring drivel in response to some of the bullshit people write here at HTMLGIANT are trolls. In this forum particularly it has become a go-to way of writing someone off and insulating your own worldview.
Anyway, there’s a solution now to the trend of curated discussion, which has had an adverse effect on the literary world, I feel. How about an open forum where anyone can start a topic and there’s no need to delete dissenters because you can just reasonably debate your point instead?
Aye, check: http://frsh.in/dw
Then what excuse will they have to gang up on me?
Not saying anyone needs an excuse to put down the underdog, but, I mean, they have this whole mask of civility.
Originally I was just going to say “drama.”
And yeah, the world decided to orbit around me this morning.
I need to be like 150% less self-critical. Then I’d get much further around here.
Just out of curiosity: did you directly accuse him of racism/sexism or did you say something reasonable and teacher-like, such as: “this could be perceived as racist and/or sexist”?
A few weeks ago a friend (?) of mine wrote some nasty insults about me on the internet. The worst part was they weren’t true, and he knew they weren’t true. Rather than engage with him on the internet about it, I called him on the phone. It was a pretty awkward conversation (he got defensive and made excuses instead of apologizing), but he agreed to take the insults down. Unfortunately, the note he put up when he did so – that the insults were a case of “mistaken identity” – was almost as bad because it was written like he didn’t know me. Not sure what to do next time I see him face-to-face.
I think the terms “absolutely right” should be cause for immediate deletion of comments in all internet forums, maybe.
The difference between her post and if you had written the same thing is that you would not have included the self-critical element, really the most illuminating part of it, which was when she came to the realization that she was as guilty of depersonalizing the commenter as he was of her; indeed, your post would, I tender with genuine certainty, have been almost wholly about how you were victimized by this terrible “real, flesh and blood person.”
And this is why we can’t be friends, I think.
Yes, yes, but you’ll say anything, so nothing you say means anything.
Yes. Sounds like you hang around a lot of dominant personalities. It almost sounded like you were referring to Facebook with the “accepted friendship” thing, but then it applies as much to real life.
I love Facebook for what I use it for. I keep up with people I genuinely care about, would attend their funerals, etc.
Great post, Amy.
Oh good. I’ve brought out your bitchy.
i don’t perceive any ill-will. i’m all for directness, not so much for slurs. as for your first question, i’m not sure how to explain why i wouldn’t want to desensitize myself. it would not solve the problem that you quoted below, since the whole problem is that i too easily allowed myself to think that the comment came from “the internet” in some way rather than a real person, and so i didn’t feel it totally until i met the person. developing a thicker skin would make me feel it even less. i recognize that i’ll get some negative feedback by writing on this site, and i’m willing to take the bad with the good. what i don’t want to do is deceive myself about where the bad is coming from. a commenter may be anonymous, but s/he is no less real. that is the crux of my post. not that i got hurt. this is not the only time that has happened. it is however the only time i’ve met the commenter in person and thus realized that i was in some ways depersonalizing him as much as he depersonalized me. i want to know the world for what it is. developing a thicker skin is only going to keep me from doing that. i am sensitive, but i am also resilient, which is why i continue to write for this site.
i’ve never said that people shouldn’t comment anonymously on this site. i don’t have a problem with that. if i didn’t “consider” those people, i guess that’s because i didn’t think it was relevant. when i say beware, all of you, i’m just saying there’s always a person behind the mask. that might not be salient, as i took pains to point out. but i think it can only be a good thing to know what (even if not exactly who) you are dealing with.
“I’m not trying to defend the actions of the person you’re talking about in this article, Amy, but I’m interested in getting at ideas that might lead toward insight, empathy 4 troll subject positions (hehe) and resolution rather than further depersonalization mud slinging.”
I think if you read my post more carefully, you will find that’s exactly what i’m trying to say. i don’t like that i depersonalized the commenter, that i didn’t see him as a whole person with other things going on (like being actual friends with a lot of my actual friends), redeeming qualities, etc. Yes, it hurt more to be faced with that reality upon meeting him, but I am still grateful for the reality check. I don’t really want to be friends with him, but I also don’t think he is evil. i think he is a person who said a hateful thing. being able to recognize that, instead of conceptualizing him as some amorphous evil internet being, is certainly an exercise in empathy.
I don’t use the word troll in my post because that’s really not what i’m talking about. i’m also not really talking about anonymous commenters as opposed to those who use their full name and link to their blog; i’m talking about how the internet, in its kind of greater anonymity, allows any of us can distance ourselves from the personhood of those we’re in conversation with, whether they post their full name or not.
perhaps this anonymous person was just having fun during mean week and called you a cum swallower because it was mean week and he was keeping in the spirit.
perhaps when this person saw you at awp he was drunk and he barely remembers speaking to you and if he saw you now he couldnt pick you out of a lineup because there was nothing at all distinguishing about you. and perhaps if he did apologize maybe it was because he was trying to get you to understand that shit just aint that serious.
perhaps this person didnt know that you ran the solar anus reading series, perhaps he thought blake and jamie ran it.
and perhaps this person wasnt apologizing because he “wanted something” perhaps this person has said and done so many stupid things in his life that he hardly fears the consequence of not being allowed to read at your reading. perhaps this person isnt some whining pussy crying over stuff people said to him online two years ago and if he says things or does things or writes things people dont like he is willing to accept the consequences without bitching.
perhaps, after all, you’re just…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rL9ihXiFAko
Throat-punch. Next question?
You just traumatized her. Look forward to her post about this in 2015.
(Sorry. Couldn’t resist.)
You just traumatized her. Look forward to her post about this in 2015.
(Sorry. Couldn’t resist.)
You just traumatized her. Look forward to her post about this in 2015.
(Sorry. Couldn’t resist.)
You just traumatized her. Look forward to her post about this in 2015.
(Sorry. Couldn’t resist.)
Personally, when I call a girl a cum guzzler, I mean it with utmost complimentary endearment. But that’s just me.
Personally, when I call a girl a cum guzzler, I mean it with utmost complimentary endearment. But that’s just me.
thanks for keeping it real, barry.
I find it helpful to think about people in terms of social skills and their ability to appropriately communicate. Like, they’re not robots, they’re just awkward people who have a difficult time communicating with other people.
I feel you on this though. I’ve stopped posting and commenting almost completely, because I don’t have the energy to deal with comment-level drama.
I should just start posting my phone number so people can call me and we can talk about things while I’m wiping a baby ass.
i feel ya gene. id o. ive almost stopped commenting completely as well…
im just not sure though, who gets to dictate what it means to communicate appropriately? who defines the social norm? god? an american or global collective conciousness? you and amy? every individual for themselves?
a lot of those perhapses are probably the case, with the exception of course of the last one. i’m not “just” anything. perhaps i didn’t give the commenter enough credit for sincerity, and drunkenness. so i took out the parts of the post where i interpret the apology, for whatever it’s worth. it isn’t relevant to my point, which is that it was eye-opening in both good and bad ways to meet the face behind the comment.
My mother had skin like yours. The mental kind, that is. Her feet were rough and craggy like topographical maps of the moon. In general her own personal commitment to this sensitivity was her continual undoing, and that kind of psychic stasis in a single mode of experiencing the world was the self-stalling of her Self. I’m sure the actual event and the implications you’ve outlined will get their appropriate share of commentary, so that’s all I really have to say.
My mother had skin like yours. The mental kind, that is. Her feet were rough and craggy like topographical maps of the moon. In general her own personal commitment to this sensitivity was her continual undoing, and that kind of psychic stasis in a single mode of experiencing the world was the self-stalling of her Self. I’m sure the actual event and the implications you’ve outlined will get their appropriate share of commentary, so that’s all I really have to say.
i feel like this is a wrong or ridiculous way of thinking about it. “the point for the trolls” feels, eh. maybe you are just kidding. like are we in middle-earth here? no one’s a troll and no one’s an asshole, i feel. and certainly the point of asshole-ish behavior has little to do with reminding real persons on the internet that evil exists. i’m pretty sure it has more to do with people just flushing out whatever their insecurities happen to be, no? do you really feel like trolls gather and prepare for the reminding of evil?
Yes, they gather at Bohemian Grove each summer to sing show tunes and prepare for reminding us of the evil.
Unrelated — doesn’t Amy sort of look like Blake Butler with a wig on in that picture? Are they cousins or something?
I’m being serious.
Not really.
But yeah.
I just laughed extremely hard at this. First time since like Friday. Wish I could like that shit twice.
lol!
lol!
The people communicating set the terms, I guess.
In this case, if the person said something shitty, and then expected it to go away with their apology, they obviously didn’t read Amy well enough. Their attempt to communicate, both through the comment and apology, failed. They had some difficulty communicating with Amy appropriately.
Unless they really just wanted to make her feel bad for an extended period of time, which would make them an asshole. Which is the other way to take a bad comment (and I, personally, would rather see anonymous people as awkward than see them as assholes).
i’m pretty sensitive to insults and aggression on the internet even when it’s not directed at me. pretty much any time someone who seems like they’d be vulnerable to harsh words (for w/e reason, mostly just a feeling) is the target of harsh words i feel worse. but especially if it’s directed at me. i feel like pathetic or feeble or something when i feel that way. idk. i didn’t read htmlgiant during mean week even if i probably missed good things.
Great post, Amy. There was a person — a somewhat known writer who had been nominated for a few major awards — who left hateful comments on my site for a period of two and a half years under several pseudonyms. He thought he was being clever, but I was able to find out who he was because he employed a reference contained in one of his books and because his IP addresses foolishly lined up with where he was making public appearances when he didn’t remember to turn on his proxy. He was obsessed with me. Visiting my website fifteen times a day. Impersonating me on other websites. And it got to a point where I had to ban him from commenting. And in this case, the very act of banning — something that I did because I was very concerned for this writer’s mental health and emotional well-being — caused me to feel an overwhelming amount of empathy for him, even as he was spending an unhealthy amount of his time fixated on me. I knew that, because his behavior had been quite sociopathic and because he had also performed similar acts to other people I know, the possibility of mending fences wasn’t there. He couldn’t be human enough to talk things out with me if he had a problem. His behavior had proven so beyond the pale that he had been pushed into territory beyond my latitude. That very much bothered me. Because had he been straight with me from the get go, either publicly or privately, he probably would have spent many of the hours he logged in obsessing over me on a book project.
I think you were very brave, Amy, in talking it out with this guy. And I also think that the best action in response to a grievance is direct communication as soon as possible. A simple “What the hell?” by phone or email, followed by careful listening, does the trick. You don’t necessarily have to have a thick skin to do this. But you do have to be brave and nip something in the bud before it gets out of control. The sooner you do that, the less likely that six months of negative emotions are going to fester.
Yes, “evil” has a face. And you can talk things out with 90% of the population, even if you don’t like the other person. But there are some people who are simply beyond the basic act of talking things out. And it’s important to be strong enough to recognize that it’s never your fault if another person refuses your gesture or is incapable of understanding the world beyond their own perspective or doesn’t have the basic courage to put their real name to a nasty emotion.
re: something phmadore said earlier: “How about an open forum where anyone can start a topic and there’s no need to delete dissenters because you can just reasonably debate your point instead?”
I would say that deletion of dissent is probably the #1 cause of trolling.
re: something phmadore said earlier: “How about an open forum where anyone can start a topic and there’s no need to delete dissenters because you can just reasonably debate your point instead?”
I would say that deletion of dissent is probably the #1 cause of trolling.
re darby: “do you really feel like trolls gather and prepare for the reminding of evil?”
You must not know any funny internet trolls. The funny ones don’t gather to prepare for the reminding of evil (lol) but they do gather to shoot the shit, make jokes, satirize the absurd, absurdly satirize, and parody the false masks of internet civility. They’re basically the stand-up comedians of the internet and there is endless material. As for ‘the reminding of evil’ (whatever that even means), that probably happens accidentally and more so with the bitter and humorless trolls who inadvertently act out that reminder in all of their creepy glory.
epithet: assimilation to Joey Goebbels
horrible: tick
virulently misogynist: X
hateful: tick
beyond-degrading: ~ [push]
It doesn’t compute, in my view, eric.
On the other side of the humorless trolls we find the humorless and creepy champions of naive internet civility/depersonalization, their orientations configured by beep boop facebook meeeeeeespace foursquare blog comment stream ethics please insert/forfeit yr biographical data in2 my database, bro, it is very becoming, u r now a community leader, thank u 4 modeling my technology lol lol lol! A lot of trolling and anti-troll trolling seems 2 b the political tensions between these positions with connotations of gated communities in the backdrop. Funny trolls take a step back and make fun of the whole mess. NAAAAAAT. Trolls Of Course Gather At Bohemian Grove Each Summer To Sing Show Tunes And Own Newbs And Prepare For Reminding Us Of The Evil And Write Serious Literary Works Of Troll Fiction.
http://frsh.in/dw
“Trolls Of Course Gather At Bohemian Grove Each Summer To Sing Show Tunes And Own Newbs And Prepare For Reminding Us Of The Evil And Write Serious Literary Works Of Troll Fiction.”
Serious Literary Works of Troll Fiction
The Call of the Troll
John Barleytroll
The Sea-Troll
Martin Eden
And let us not forget: Troll & Other Essays
“Trolls Of Course Gather At Bohemian Grove Each Summer To Sing Show Tunes And Own Newbs And Prepare For Reminding Us Of The Evil And Write Serious Literary Works Of Troll Fiction.”
Serious Literary Works of Troll Fiction
The Call of the Troll
John Barleytroll
The Sea-Troll
Martin Eden
And let us not forget: Troll & Other Essays
Again, another thank you for this essay.
Only once did I participate, inadvertently, during mean week. Someone responded harshly and I responded inappropriately. By that I mean, I took the insult seriously.
Blake Butler understood that I didn’t understand fully the nature of exchanges during mean week. He defended my indignation, even though it was unwarranted. (For that I was very grateful.) I, too, wonder about the necessity of mean week. Why? One encounters meanness walking to the bank, going to the grocery store, waiting at the dentist. It is everywhere. Perhaps a more radical project would be, for a brief period, the practice of an archaic, convoluted politeness: think of the style of 18th century letters when the petition was essential and politeness a common mechanism used for furthering the least of projects.
having a thick skin and being sensitive aren’t mutually exclusive. having a thick skin is ‘being resilient’.
it’s likely i (and a lot of others here) have mistaken a discussion on the nature of anonymity online with a farrago of self-evident truths: ‘a commenter may be anonymous, but s/he is no less real. that is the crux of my post.’
and i mean what i said about a public platform being more for the audience than for the speaker. you used the word “i” and its variants 33 times in your reply to me.
neat site
WOW!!! I just bumped into this doing random Google searches and was a little blown away by it all. It really makes you think… I’m glad you wrote this and I’m glad I found it. Thanks for sharing. I’m in fact so inspired that I think I’m going to write a song based on this content. Maybe someday when I’m done I’ll share.