The Troll Issue: A troll by any other name

As a naive child with a Napoleon complex and the BMI of a bowling ball, there were three major injustices in the world: 1) Candy made you fat. 2) Fat made you fat. 3) Darth Vader, the Emperor and their entire well-oiled, omnipotent Empire that ruled everything were robbed by a pair of incestuous twins, a known felon and his dog. The Rebellion won simply because the story required them to. The audience needed them to. What “should happen” won out over what made sense.

I was incensed. Furious over the myopic victory of what we now call political correctness. “What lesson are we teaching children?!” I ranted, with a force that sent ripples down my gelatine thighs, to other children my age who just wanted to get back to mindlessly chasing each other around a stone bench. “George Lucas sucks!”

Then I tried to cure the world of its logic-deficiency via baptism by bucket water while performing the routine from Flashdance. It didn’t work.

The fact is I’ve always been a heckler. At age 11, my favourite pastime was to disrupt lessons by incessantly questioning the teacher’s understanding of basic grammar, leading her to banish me from her kingdom to a class populated by far more intelligent kids who didn’t study because they were so smart — where I stayed for days. It was the highlight of my primary school career, seeing as said teacher had to swallow her pride and send for me to return to her castle before losing her job, defaulting on her mortgage payments and teaching her fellow homeless brethren questionable grammar.

When I wasn’t in school, I annoyed my long-suffering tutor for years, repeatedly mocking her inexplicable need to break up Leonardo Da Vinci’s name by slipping the Renaissance artist into random conversation. “If the sum of three numbers is 39, and the second number is three times the first, and the third number is four more than the first, then the three numbers are Leonah, Dohdah, Vinchee!”

Some children can count, others pick up the trombone with ease. I was naturally gifted at being a jerk. If I had grown up in this digital age instead of the stone-wash denim age I belong to, my compulsion to poke fun at things would most probably have been unleashed online, adding to the population of feral trolls.

Here comes the exposition.

A troll, according to Wikipedia, the encyclopaedia twit-tanica of information, is a “person who sows discord on the Internet by starting arguments or upsetting people by posting inflammatory, extraneous or off-topic messages in an online community … provoking readers into an emotional response or otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion”. According to about.com, the Mustafa Centre of knowledge, “trolls thrive in any environment where they are allowed to make public comments”.

But here’s where I’d like to point out something that isn’t commonly highlighted in this age of cautious propriety: Trolls aren’t necessarily evil.

Just like violence in film, fisheye lenses in photography, and the Death Star, mockery and targeted irreverence in any medium aren’t intrinsically reprehensible. Used for good, trolling can entertain, point out ridiculousness, reveal ugly truths about society, and challenge conventional thought. Sometimes, “provoking readers into an emotional response or otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion” isn’t always a bad thing. Context is key.

When used for evil, however, trolling tips over into very dangerous territory. The Mustafa Centre of knowledge defines the Internet troll as “someone who stirs up drama and abuses online anonymity by purposely sowing hatred, bigotry, racism, misogyny, or just simple bickering between others”. But when that happens, you’re not just a troll any more. Let’s call you what you really are: A bigot, a bully and a coward.

It’s a thin line between laugh and hate. But the solution isn’t to be politically correct and rub out the ribbing — the answer is to fight the hate. Trolls aren’t going anywhere, and with the Internet only becoming an ever-increasingly indispensable part of our lives, it is imperative that we always check to see which side of that line we’re operating from. It only makes sense.

So, what kins of troll are you? Take the test: http:tdy.sg/troll0329