Something we hear frequently is that politics are getting more and more polarized with each side viewing the other as villainous and acting in bad faith. Many see the internet as a primary culprit because we can create like-minded echo chambers, and we can get riled up fighting for our side against the other side. That’s quite different from pre-internet days when we often didn’t even know who people voted for or what their political party was. Back then, trolls were still a fictional creature from a Grimm’s fairy tale, not actual people who like to anger their ideological enemies for sport.
According to the Urban Dictionary, a troll is
One who posts a deliberately provocative message to a newsgroup or message board with the intention of causing maximum disruption and argument
Trolls are there to rile people up, not necessarily to persuade or convince others. They just want to watch the mayhem ensue. Wickipedia adds:
In Internet slang, a troll (/ˈtroʊl/, /ˈtrɒl/) is a person who sows discord on the Internet by starting arguments or upsetting people, by posting inflammatory,[1] extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as a newsgroup, forum, chat room, or blog) with the intent of provoking readers into an emotional response[2] or of otherwise disrupting normal, on-topic discussion,[3] often for the troll’s amusement.
This sense of both the noun and the verb “troll” is associated with Internet discourse, but also has been used more widely. Media attention in recent years has equated trolling with online harassment. For example, the mass media have used “troll” to mean “a person who defaces Internet tribute sites with the aim of causing grief to families.” . . .
Application of the term troll is subjective. Some readers may characterize a post as trolling, while others may regard the same post as a legitimate contribution to the discussion, even if controversial. Like any pejorative term, it can be used as an ad hominem attack, suggesting a negative motivation. . . . At times, the word can be abused to refer to anyone with controversial opinions they disagree with.
Some would imbue trolls with extra intelligence, only considering someone to be a troll if they are making disingenuous arguments for their amusement, not making specious unsupported arguments that are inflammatory but that they agree with. Regardless of the definition, most blogs, including ours, encourage people to steer clear and not engage. “Don’t feed the trolls” is an oft heard refrain when someone is disrupting a discussion online.
Historically, venting has been seen as a superior way to deal with anger to bottling it up and letting it leak out in passive-aggressive ways; holding it in is seen as dangerous, even life-threatening. If so, our current president appears to be the picture of mental health, and all this venting that people have been doing in the wake of the election is a net positive. Some scattered individual citizens acting out in violence against minorities have felt emboldened since the election to vent their feelings. Aside from these more extreme acts, there’s a sentiment, particularly among older people and conservatives, that political correctness is bad for society, that it’s better to say what we think than it is to be hyper-sensitive to the feelings of those who might be offended; they might say we are fooling ourselves about everyone getting along. Some would say it’s better to get that negativity out there rather than keeping it at a low simmer inside.
But maybe it’s not.
I recently watched several episodes of a You Tube show called Mind Field. Each episode explores an aspect of psychology. I highly recommend the series to those interested in psychological experiments but who don’t want to kill a weekend trying to come up with their own experiments. Here’s a link to the trailer for Episode 3:
In Episode 3, the host conducts a psychological experiment that exposes one downside to venting our feelings. The experiment proceeds in three phases:
Phase One: Reading & Responding to an Inflammatory Essay
Participants are tasked with giving feedback to a person about an essay written by another “participant.” The essayist is fictitious. The essays are specifically designed to push the buttons of the individual asked to give the feedback. For example, a black woman is asked to review an essay written by a racist. As she reads the essay, she becomes extremely agitated, to the point that she finally has to go to the photo of the “essayist” that was placed in the room and put the picture face down because she can’t stand to look at him. She is very upset. Each of the participants reads an essay designed to inflame him or her.
Phase Two: Venting or Reflecting
When the participants are emotionally riled up, half of them are taken to a room filled with beautiful artwork and objects and they are asked to sit quietly and reflect for a timed period. The other half of the participants are taken to a similar room but given a baseball bat and encouraged to vent their feelings by smashing everything in the room. Some of them really go overboard, attacking and dismantling even the shelves and table. The more they rage, the more they can rage.
Phase Three: Vengeance
In the next phase, participants are given a shock buzzer and an intensity dial and paired with the original “essayist” whom they are told is in another room. If they are the first person to hit the button, they are permitted to administer shocks to the essayist at whatever level of intensity they choose. When they administer the shock, they hear the other person cry out in pain. If the other person is first to hit the button, the other person is permitted to administer a shock to them at whatever level they choose. In reality, there is no other person since the essayist was a fabrication of the experiment.
Consistently, the people who had been encouraged to vent their feelings with violence in phase two administered higher levels of shock, some cranking the intensity dial all the way up. The people in the reflection room, on the other hand, were more subdued and reluctant to administer the shocks, even apologetic for doing so.
Conclusion
While it’s an interesting experiment, there are a few issues I see with its broad application to internet trolling & venting:
- Physical violence is not the same thing as arguing. Maybe that’s a difference of degree rather than kind, but if the experiment shows that venting with physical violence makes us meaner, that doesn’t necessarily mean that heated arguing does the same thing.
- All participants were riled up, but reflection time resulted in people becoming unwilling to exact vengeance on their “enemies.” And perhaps the internet is naturally a reflective medium. After all, aside from obsessive personalities who can’t stop tweeting at 3 in the morning so they can be fresh in the morning for their job running the free world, most of us take time to step away or to refuse to feed the trolls.
What do you think?
- Does arguing on the internet make people meaner and less empathetic to opposing viewpoints?
- Does it depend on one’s personal temperament?
- Where do you draw the line on defining “trolls”?
Discuss.
Wheat & Tares 
I think a major problem is in framing things in terms of two entirely different metaphors:
The valve metaphor says that pressure builds up and needs to be released in order to bring us back to safe levels. But there are no valves.
The other metaphor speaks of reinforcing response patterns. This is essentially what a brain does.
Nice, Jeff. I also think aggression builds up it’s own feedback loop that de-sensitises us to further expression of anger. But maybe that’s just personal experience. What works for me is taking note of my feelings and trying to resolve the stressful dynamic. Anger is just information until we express it aggressively, so harmless in it’s self.
My father used to garden a lot. He had a high stress job, & said that beating the dirt helped him, & the dirt benefited. Works for me, too.
The trailer asks why? Because many people have (innocently created) rage trapped at an infant level of their psyche. Subconsciously they know it’s there and at some level they fear it and/or are embarrassed by it so they use a wide variety (mostly transparent) defenses in an attempt to keep it contained. However the suddenness of being cut off on the highway while driving can easily and quickly end run these defenses resulting in it spilling out as road rage. Venting is just catharsis not cure however there are regression techniques that can cure rage.
We were born into and will likely die from a world of ongoing but mostly unseen class warfare where hidden elites use divide and conquer techniques via media and school indoctrination and lies to keep us distracted and divided so they can more easily rule over us. Witness the damage done to the secular family in a just few decades. Black & white ideological positions and (tribal) team loyalty keep us in (at least symbolic) confrontation. My team, party or religion right or wrong.
Black and white thinking is the immature thinking of a child yet many of our institutions and churches promote it as they encourage us to remain small and thereby more controllable. Heated black and white argument encourages us to retreat to our “safe places” which are nothing more than tribal echo chambers. It’s amazing that we find the opposing point of view so threading that we can’t even endure the debate without our blankie. The core of the problem is a childlike inability to tolerate ambivalence and a lack of appreciation for nuance which defuses black and white.
Please fish my comment out of the filter.
Venting and reflection aren’t the same thing – but the internet can facilitate both. If you are attempting to have a calm, intellectual debate, then emotional outbursts (venting or deliberately inflammatory remarks) aren’t helpful. They switch the conversation from intellectual to emotional. In the same vein, if you are venting to your echo chamber of like peers, you are looking for emotional validation – not intellectual back-and-forth. People who come into an emotional conversation expecting an intellectual debate will inevitably come across as jerks and entirely unsympathetic (accused of being trolls).
People need spaces to vent and they need spaces to engage rationally with opposing viewpoints. It doesn’t usually work to do both at the same time. In terms of the experiment, it’s healthy to have a type of “rage” room where you do the catharsis thing, but if you are looking to understand the other side or engage in intellectual debate, you need to prepare by spending time in the “reflection” room.
I really like Mary Ann’s comment — but I disagree with it. I’m not convinced venting into an echo chamber is at all good. Sure, it’s nice not to feel alone and have people who empathize with you, but along with the feeling of solidarity comes a growing sense of outrage. I’m on a bit of an anti-outrage kick. Maybe I’m naive, but in my understanding of history, the most effective civil rights advocates were the ones who were firm and resolute, but used civil methods to protest. Using uncivil methods generally created a backlash and usually impeded the very progress they were trying to make. Outrage (at least by my definition) results in uncivil behavior on the internet which leads to a hardening of polarization. I’m well aware of how I’ve commented on blogs in the past and indulged in goading people I disagreed with (a temptation I haven’t entirely overcome), and I’ve come to the conclusion that interacting that way never did anybody any good, including me. But, I have to admit I’ve never really felt a desire to vent into an echo chamber, so I when I claim there’s no value to whatever catharsis one gets, I have no idea what I’m talking about. I’ve just never seen any good come out of them.
I like both Martin and Mary Ann’s comments!!!
Taking Martin’s comment back to the original experiment on the Mind Field show, I wonder what would have happened if the African American woman reading the racist essay had been put in a room of friends or like-minded people and allowed to read the essay aloud to them and discuss their reactions. It would certainly have increased outrage. I was outraged by the fake essay, and I knew it was fake, and I’m not African American! It’s one concern I’ve often had about the bloggernacle and internet FB groups: that we discuss our issues with those who are likely to support us, and this escalates outrage while being completely ineffective at addressing it.
But rest assured, the same thing likely happens all the time in the COB and in our local ward councils. There are echo chambers everywhere. It’s a human condition.
How do we get these concerns into those groups in such a way that people will care? Well, so far we blog, but like Jerry Seinfeld says about cat calls in the street as a way to find a girlfriend: “These are the best ideas we have.” Not terribly effective. Eventually, many get tired of trying and simply leave. Does online discussion escalate that time frame or manufacture the outrage? Sometimes. And sometimes it de-escalates it. I’ve certainly seen both.
I think “good” or “bad” depends on how it impacts other people. Road rage isn’t good just to express emotion and get it out…because someone else is involved and could get hurt. Same with trolling.
But releasing some stress by venting to a trusted friend who knows me and knows i do more than argue, but just on occasion need this moment…that seems safe, and might be healthy, and won’t harm anyone.
I’ve always been raised to control my anger, and don’t find it often helps to get it out. But…there might be moments the temple needs to be cleared of money changers…it just doesn’t seem to happen often…but it isn’t like it never is a good thing. I’m probably more passive aggressive than I should be.
I have found a lot of benefit to sharing online about church topics. It seems pretty safe and harmless to others, as long as I’m sincere (trolling doesn’t make sense to me but I watch out for it from other strangers).
But sometimes it feels like if I vent with no effort to learn from it or openly accept opposing views…the temptation is to be more negative about other things in my life. Perhaps frequency plays a role. Venting too much is just murmuring. Every once in a while having a “moment” to a trusted friend seems like they’d understand and I would be falling into the temptation of just complaining without doing anything about it.
I think Martin’s point is valid. So my question, is it possible to have some sort of venting/catharsis online, more like what Heber13 said to a trusted friend or circle of friends, without it devolving into outrage? There are certain blogs which seem to act as therapeutic support groups, but I agree it’s much easier there to feed indignant rage. For some people, the lack of a trusted friend who would be sympathetic to a specific problem is what sends them online in the first place.
Mary Ann, et al. I think the experiment in the post was perhaps too polarized. The only two options are reflecting in a peaceful room or smashing everything in sight with a bat. Internet forums really do contain both types of interactions: some that rile us up, some that talk us off the ledge. Certainly we should be wise enough to avoid those who rile us up for their own amusement, but it takes even more wisdom to stay calm when like-minded people want to storm the castle. Fortunately for me, I’m far too lazy to carry a pitchfork that far.