{"id":785,"date":"2008-08-02T08:50:11","date_gmt":"2008-08-02T15:50:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2008\/08\/god-loves-a-troll\/"},"modified":"2008-08-02T08:57:57","modified_gmt":"2008-08-02T15:57:57","slug":"god-loves-a-troll","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2008\/08\/02\/god-loves-a-troll\/","title":{"rendered":"God Loves A Troll"},"content":{"rendered":"

from The New York Times<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

The Trolls Among Us<\/nyt_headline><\/h1>\n

<\/p>\n

Robbie Cooper for The New York Times<\/p>\n

The Trolls Among Us: Weev (not, of course, his real name) is part of a growing Internet subculture with a fluid morality and a disdain for pretty much everyone else online.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/nyt_byline><\/span><\/p>\n

By MATTATHIAS SCHWARTZ<\/p>\n

One afternoon in the spring of 2006, for reasons unknown to those who knew him, Mitchell Henderson, a seventh grader from Rochester, Minn., took a .22-caliber rifle down from a shelf in his parents\u2019 bedroom closet and shot himself in the head. The next morning, Mitchell\u2019s school assembled in the gym to begin mourning. His classmates created a virtual memorial on\u00a0MySpace<\/a>\u00a0and garlanded it with remembrances. One wrote that Mitchell was \u201can hero to take that shot, to leave us all behind. God do we wish we could take it back. . . . \u201d Someone e-mailed a clipping of Mitchell\u2019s newspaper obituary to\u00a0MyDeathSpace.com<\/a>, a Web site that links to the MySpace pages of the dead. From MyDeathSpace, Mitchell\u2019s page came to the attention of an Internet message board known as \/b\/ and the \u201ctrolls,\u201d as they have come to be called, who dwell there.<\/p>\n

\/b\/ is the designated \u201crandom\u201d board of\u00a04chan.org<\/a>, a group of message boards that draws more than 200 million page views a month. A post consists of an image and a few lines of text. Almost everyone posts as \u201canonymous.\u201d In effect, this makes \/b\/ a panopticon in reverse \u2014 nobody can see anybody, and everybody can claim to speak from the center. The anonymous denizens of 4chan\u2019s other boards \u2014 devoted to travel, fitness and several genres of pornography \u2014 refer to the \/b\/-dwellers as \u201c\/b\/tards.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/a>Measured in terms of depravity, insularity and traffic-driven turnover, the culture of \/b\/ has little precedent. \/b\/ reads like the inside of a high-school bathroom stall, or an obscene telephone party line, or a blog with no posts and all comments filled with slang that you are too old to understand.<\/p>\n

Something about Mitchell Henderson struck the denizens of \/b\/ as funny. They were especially amused by a reference on his MySpace page to a lost\u00a0iPod<\/a>. Mitchell Henderson, \/b\/ decided, had killed himself over a lost iPod. The \u201can hero\u201d meme was born. Within hours, the anonymous multitudes were wrapping the tragedy of Mitchell\u2019s death in absurdity.<\/p>\n

Someone hacked Henderson\u2019s MySpace page and gave him the face of a zombie. Someone placed an iPod on Henderson\u2019s grave, took a picture and posted it to \/b\/. Henderson\u2019s face was appended to dancing iPods, spinning iPods, hardcore porn scenes. A dramatic re-enactment of Henderson\u2019s demise appeared on\u00a0YouTube<\/a>, complete with shattered iPod. <\/a>The phone began ringing at Mitchell\u2019s parents\u2019 home. \u201cIt sounded like kids,\u201d remembers Mitchell\u2019s father, Mark Henderson, a 44-year-old I.T. executive. \u201cThey\u2019d say, \u2018Hi, this is Mitchell, I\u2019m at the cemetery.\u2019 \u2018Hi, I\u2019ve got Mitchell\u2019s iPod.\u2019 \u2018Hi, I\u2019m Mitchell\u2019s ghost, the front door is locked. Can you come down and let me in?\u2019 \u201d He sighed. \u201cIt really got to my wife.\u201d The calls continued for a year and a half.<\/p>\n

In the late 1980s<\/strong>, Internet users adopted the word \u201ctroll\u201d to denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities. Early trolling was relatively innocuous, taking place inside of small, single-topic Usenet groups. The trolls employed what the\u00a0M.I.T.\u00a0<\/a>professor Judith Donath calls a \u201cpseudo-na\u00efve\u201d tactic, asking stupid questions and seeing who would rise to the bait. The game was to find out who would see through this stereotypical newbie behavior, and who would fall for it. As one guide to trolldom puts it, \u201cIf you don\u2019t fall for the joke, you get to be in on it.\u201d<\/p>\n

[ click to read full article at NYTimes.com<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The New York Times The Trolls Among Us Robbie Cooper for The New York Times The Trolls Among Us: Weev (not, of course, his real name) is part of a growing Internet subculture with a fluid morality and a disdain for pretty much everyone else online. By MATTATHIAS SCHWARTZ One afternoon in the spring […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/785","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=785"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/785\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}