Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

Hello little brother!

I'm sure you've struggled as I have in finding relevance in school to your own personal world. A lot of the academic is boring and dry, and with the exciting and fast pace of the digital world we now live in, it's easy to think of such things as irrelevant to our lives. History in particular is easy to discount as irrelevant- who cares about what happened so long ago, when our times are so different from then anyways? It's easy to forget how we have all this technology in the first place.

The Internet is Not New

Jordan Murray, Alec Parkinson, and Josh Olsen

The internet is full of sensationalism, dubious information, and inflammatory dialog. Because of the internet’s very nature, we are constantly exposed to these things in a way we never have been before. It is tempting to blame the medium for these problems - but none of these things are new. Although the internet is unlike past forms of communication in the speed with which new ideas can be created, disseminated, and fought over, it simply represents an amplification of issues which humankind has been dealing with for hundreds of years.

On The Origin of Trolls

Trolls are everywhere on the internet. They lurk in forums from Yahoo to YouTube, ready to engage the unsuspecting in an endless series of flame wars, to their own amusement. The MIT Technology Review posted an article at the end of 2014 about a man who made an entire TV show by unmasking trolls, and highlighted the damage trolls can do. At the same time, certain trolls (like Ken M) are seen as harmless and even venerated as talented humorists.

There is no doubt that our modern world is widely influenced by trolls, in both positive and negative (although mostly negative) ways. But trolls and the inflammatory dialog they spew have been with us for far longer than since the inception of the internet, and have in fact haunted the bridge of human communication since as long as such a thing has existed. Using the perspective gained by an examination of historical trolling, we can see that although trolls are often unpleasant and, if unchecked, dangerous, they are an inescapable consequence of free thought.