This blog represents my opinions and my opinions alone, and certainly doesn't represent the collective thoughts of any of the Boards or organizations that I serve on. Unfortunately I make all sorts of miistakes, I'm a picky eater, I can't sing and I just recently found out I have been spelling certain words in my vocabulary wrong my entire life. That being said, I still continue to muddle ever onward. Welcome.





Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Where Anonymity Breeds Contempt

From the New York Times:
By JULIE ZHUO

Times Topic: Social Networking

THERE you are, peacefully reading an article or watching a video on the Internet. You finish, find it thought-provoking, and scroll down to the comments section to see what other people thought. And there, lurking among dozens of well-intentioned opinions, is a troll.

“How much longer is the media going to milk this beyond tired story?” “These guys are frauds.” “Your idiocy is disturbing.” “We’re just trying to make the world a better place one brainwashed, ignorant idiot at a time.” These are the trollish comments, all from anonymous sources, that you could have found after reading a CNN article on the rescue of the Chilean miners.

Trolling, defined as the act of posting inflammatory, derogatory or provocative messages in public forums, is a problem as old as the Internet itself, although its roots go much farther back. Even in the fourth century B.C., Plato touched upon the subject of anonymity and morality in his parable of the ring of Gyges.

That mythical ring gave its owner the power of invisibility, and Plato observed that even a habitually just man who possessed such a ring would become a thief, knowing that he couldn’t be caught. Morality, Plato argues, comes from full disclosure; without accountability for our actions we would all behave unjustly.

The rest of the article can be found here.
Thoughts?

5 comments:

  1. I ignore them. It's not difficult.

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  2. Jessica,
    Did you have a particular post in mind when you shared this article with us.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Nope, just an interesting article, although I do believe that anonymity of blog comments does tend to bring out the daggers in most people. I worried about that tendency when I started this blog- for the most part posters have been pretty respectful, but boy oh boy, every once in a while someone gives you one right in the kisser. It's awesome to facilitate conversation, but dangerous when someone has an axe to grind; sometimes difficult to find a balance.

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