It’s that time of the week again, that time when all the chips come down, and whatever gripes have been stewing slowly in our cortices are fit to be laid on that eternal parchment, the blog.  In light of recent event, and I think we all know the events to which I’m referring, it’s high time that someone asked a few tough questions of the audience.  It’s hard, in a public forum, to say something that pleases one and all, but we try to be relatively unbiased in what we say and be professional in our demeanor.  There lies the conundrum: we are placed in a public forum, not able to hide behind the invisible door that separates print journalists from the frothing masses who wish to stride into the sunset with their severed heads.  When we say something, be it true or false, opinion or hard fact, there is a line of people, stretching out the door, waiting to leave a nugget on our virtual doorstep either praising what we say as messianic, or damning it to the seventh level of Dante’s Hell.  There are those who only wish to do the latter, and in turn seek out weblogs that have a good probability of posting stories and opinions with which they disagree.  We like to refer to these maniacally perverted type b personalities as trolls.

Nothing is worse in the world of online media than to have your mailbox filled with spam, and your weblog crammed with comments that have no journalistic merit whatsoever.  There is nothing more disenheartening than to see that your comment thread has been hijacked, hijacked by those cyber-terrors who wish nothing more than to turn people away from the thoughts and ideas of someone who disagrees with them.  Because that’s what it’s all about, is it not?  It’s about power, the power to force your opinion on another by repeating it as boisterously and obnoxiously as possible from whatever pulpit is available to you.  Unfortunately for the rest of us, the biggest forum available to the trolls of the world, are the thousands of online weblogs.

What I say is rarely universally popular; in fact, rarely do more than one or two people actually believe it.  I can however tell you that nothing that I have ever said has been any more or less than the truth as my own eyes see it.  This article is not about me, my opinions, or my weblog on DT.  This article is about the black hand of lies and deceit that threatens to choke out the opinions, the freedom of people to say whatever they wish.  A troll is defined as a person who has no interest in the topic under discussion, but wishes instead to leave comments hoping for an inflammatory response.  While this definition of the troll remains true, the underhandedness of trolling and its motives, I believe, have expanded.  The motivation for some of the more insidious trollers out there is no longer simply to illicit unprepared, poorly constructed flames in order to make the poster look foolish.  Trollers have figured out that if they troll long enough and loudly enough that they will be able to control what people read, what they are able to learn from websites.

The recreational troller is harmless with the exception of being annoying.  The professional troller, however, seeks to drive people away from sources of knowledge that do not fit the troller’s ideals through the act of annoying people until they stop reading of visiting a particular source of information.  Propaganda it is called: say something enough times with relative authority and people are bound to believe it.  In places like Nazi Germany, and present day China, state-sponsored propaganda was and is used to control the citizenship.  Online, we have the option to ignore this propaganda.  What we don’t realize, is that too often, the propagandists are still imposing their will on us by simple making us go elsewhere.  The aim was to make us believe what they believe, and in forcing us turn our backs on a source of information, the propagandists have moved one step closer to that goal.

I need to wrap this up, for I am writing it at work, and if I want to be able to come back tomorrow, I had better not get caught.  I do still want to leave you all with a message, with something that you can do to stave off the relentless advance of the narrow minded.  All too often I head phrases like, “I don’t go to that blog any more because of too many trollers.” This is, unfortunately, the one thing that we cannot do.  We cannot allow ourselves to be corralled like beasts into places where we would rather not be, but feel that we must go because none of us have the time to cut through the crap and ignore all the mindless flame spouted on the average weblog.  It is truly our civic duty not to divert our eyes, but to desensitize them to the mounds of dung that are posted so that we may get down to the root of issues that are discussed.  Only in doing that, are we truly doing something for the greater good.  Being the better person and turning the other cheek are no longer applicable.  A war is being waged, the war of the words, and the good must not allow the wicked a single victory; for if they do, the remaining bastions of free knowledge will topple like dominoes and a will that is not our own shall be imposed on us all.