 Anyone who makes an account on the NRA forums just to start a flay more about homicide statistics is clearly a gun control So this week, I'm going to the New York Comic Con Thankfully, I don't have to worry about the Westboro Baptist Church showing up and protesting for some inexplicable reason because that's more of a San Diego thing But going to Comic Con does have me thinking a little bit about trolling in general and how it relates to geeks I'm going to define what I mean by trolling and if you're curious about what I mean by geeks I made a whole video about that so go ahead and click if you're curious the definition of trolling is Perhaps appropriately a topic that's frequently used for trolling What counts or doesn't count as a troll post is highly subjective But there are some aspects of those posts that are fairly universally recognized trolls are by almost all accounts Individuals who disrupt normal discourse with statements, which are by nature Inflammatory the success of a troll post is determined by the scale and vehemence of the response to those statements The more violent and disruptive the reaction the better Big air quotes around better colloquially There's been a growing usage of the term trolling to describe any action which results in an upset audience Including hate speech bullying death threats or pranks or even earnest criticism that just makes people angry now I very much believe in the flexibility of language and I think that a word's definition should match its usage But personally in order to call something trolling instead of just abuse or a prank Which we have words for already it must seem by all appearances to be innocuous and genuine While secretly being engineered to upset people so Rick rolling while it is engineered to be a prank not trolling Threatening someone harassing them or calling them names while it might make them upset and get a reaction is abuse Not trolling Innocently asking whether an airplane on a treadmill would take off on a high school physics forum trolling even with that rigid of a definition what counts is seemingly innocuous is still highly subjective But it certainly isn't what most people would call trolling trolling in the original sense of the word is more than anything else subtle capable of causing flame wars of incredible magnitude without any indication that anything is amiss Needless to say by almost any definition Most people don't like trolls because they lower the quality of discourse on the internet for their own amusement for that reason an Onus has been placed on reasonable posters everywhere not to respond to obviously inflammatory posts because Attention only makes the problem worse rule number 14 of the internet is don't feed the trolls But there's still the general attitude of smirking acceptance like what are you gonna do? There are even some who will go so far as to defend trolling as a form of poetic justice Saying that it's not just a pastime for board sadists, but a just punishment for weakness of character After all the highest priority troll targets are those who absolutely need everyone else to share their point of view People who are so enraged by any disagreement that they get to the point of unwarranted verbal abuse However, trolling doesn't stop those people from being annoying and it certainly doesn't teach them tolerance If anything, it's making them worse an impressive number of psychological studies on anger and catharsis links in the description All indicate that the more time that somebody spends in angry states of mind Whether they're punching a pillow or typing furiously at a troll on the internet The more prone they are to anger and acts of aggression like verbal abuse It's true that expressing anger and other intense emotions in Constructive ways has a definite psychological benefit But the more that someone is inspired to rant angrily on the internet The more likely it is that they'll become an even bigger jerk online and in real life That would suggest that trolling isn't just ruining a forum for a little while It's actually training people to be irate easily offended curmudgins It's making the world a less tolerant place than it already is So that's great. There's something in particular about the nature of trolling that really gets to me It necessarily targets people who really care a lot about something Like geeks. To get the sort of flame war that trolls are looking for They need to find a topic that is something that people disagree about sure But also something that people care deeply about so that if they succeed the troll can just chuckle to themselves about how Everybody's getting worked up about something that doesn't really matter But here's the thing that topic is clearly important to the trolled and that might be something to be admired or even protected In an era of cynicism and hipsters There's definitely a current of opinion that whatever that thing you're into is you probably shouldn't be so into it as we've discussed Meaning doesn't really exist outside of people's heads a person who doesn't really care about anything doesn't have to make any Assertions or build anything They can happily sit on the sidelines and make fun of the people who are actually playing the game And it is just a game. It's absurdly easy to say that somebody is stupid for caring about something that you don't It takes almost zero mental energy to say that their favorite anime is poorly written or that their favorite team sucks Or that their heroes are flawed and in so doing make them really upset But the only way to care about anything at all whether it's Sherlock or freedom of speech or space travel Or the future of discourse on the internet is to stand in opposition to that urge and say it might be done But it's still okay to care about it in that sense I think that trolls might represent the antithesis of what it is to be a geek a sort of smirking criticism of unironic enthusiasm about a fandom or anything a sort of Personification of the idea that you shouldn't care so much some geeks might be trolls But it seems to me that the act of trolling itself is fundamentally Anti-geek, which is pretty weird considering where the term trolling comes from I mean use net might have more people on it now than it did in the 80s But it's still pretty much for geeks. Do you think that the term trolling is overused? Do you think that trolling as I described it is inherently corrosive to geek them? Please Carefully leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching Don't forget to blah blah subscribe, blah share, and I'll see you next week