Many have long suspected the internet is essentially one big roiling wellspring of bile, but there hasn't been much scientific proof to bolster this premise until now. A new study in The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, suggests the internet isn't just enabling and giving voice to trolls, it's actually a feedback loop that's poisoning the well of discourse and infecting us all with the negativity virus, amplifying the petty cretin's barbaric yawp in a self-replicating incubator of savage behavior.
The study attempted to measure what researchers called "the nasty effect" online. The researchers showed participants a blog post about a new tech product, then asked them to read comments about the post. One group were shown constructive, polite discourse, while the second were exposed to more crass commentary. They found that the readers who were forced to wade into the typically teeth-gnashing battle zone of the commentariat came away from the article with a more negative impression on the original post than the former group.
Many of the reactions to this study so far have been of the usual hand-wringing, there-goes-the-internet-neighborhood variety, ensuring that the troll retains its position as the emblem of the terminal decline of our national discourse. But much like the pilot fish that swim amidst the jaws of a shark, cleaning bits of undigested food off the great beast's teeth, the troll too performs a crucial janitorial function in the internet ecosystem that too often goes unremarked upon.
Trolling isn't discourse, at least not as we commonly understand it; it's more of a performance, arising from the same impulse that drove punk rock, an expression of vague anger and frustration directed from a position of powerlessness. The desired effect is the same: elicit shocked laughter or umbrage, jar people out of complacency, provoke for the sake of provoking. When executed well, an act of trollery can serve the same brutal function as The Maggots' splenetic 1980 classic "Let's Get, Let's Get Tammy Wynette" – an outsider's credo writ large across the cultural template, and the people to whom these salvos are directed predictably, and rightfully, find them annoying, even scary. That's the point.
Where things get confusing online, though, and the difference between trolls and what we think of as traditional outsiders, is that trolls don't only ply their sneering trade on the fringes anymore; they're welcomed, and in fact encouraged in many cases, to take part in the mainstream dialogue on major media sites, giving off the impression of legitimacy, and over-inflating our impression of their numbers – the average internet reader tends to have opinions that are, well, average. Our hearty trolls, on the other hand, speak no more for the American population than a band like Anal Cunt, the band responsible for this gratuitous attack on civility...
... spoke for Top 40 radio, but inviting them onto the websites of, say, The New York Times is like having the Sex Pistols play Carnegie Hall.
Are we sure that would've been such a bad idea? If the trolls were going to capsize us all under the sheer weight of their trolling mass, it would have happened by now. As I see it, we still haven't devolved into a literal culture of barbarians IRL, screaming across the street or the subway car to one another to "Go die in a fire" (unless you live in my hometown of Boston).
You may not agree with the tenor of the internet's punks, just as you may have found the sounds of any particular generation's punk bands unlistenable, but few of us would quibble with the need for a chorus of dissent, even of the sophomoric variety. In a time when it's easy to relax into the political filter bubble through specified news outlets that conform to our already existent views, or passively receive the latest repurposed-release-as-news blog post, a bit of old fashioned troll buggery can snap us out of the haze and force us to think, however briefly, about the other side. The result may still be "This person is an idiot," but at least we've been forced to think about why they're an idiot.
Luke O'Neil is a writer in Boston. Follow him on Twitter @lukeoneil47