Trolls

There is no shortage of opinions on Internet “trolls” and their penchant for belittling anything and everything on the web. Media critic James Bowman’s essay on this at-times unsavory web voice comes to life out of a scrap of paper with the words, “ASSHOLE! LEARN TO PARK, JERK” attached to his car’s windshield outside a restaurant where he and his wife had Thanksgiving dinner:

The contribution to this process of our democratic and egalitarian assumptions about culture, our anti-elitism, and the technological means—through infinite self- publishing on the internet—to indulge these anti-taste tastes should not be underestimated either. As one who has throughout his writing life worked as a critic, I still believe in the nobility of the profession, but I would be a fool not to notice that as we approach ever nearer to that ideal state in which no man’s (or woman’s) opinion is of any more worth in the cultural market place than any other’s, that my position, like that of the news media whom I criticize in these pages, is becoming increasingly untenable. And although I continue to believe that I still have important things to say which not just anyone could say, the language I must use to say them and the culture within which I must use it are becoming steadily degraded to the point where, eventually, no one will be able to say anything much more useful or valuable than the crude personal insults scribbled anonymously on the paper under my windshield wiper.

Bowman, J. (2011). Rise of the trolls. New Criterion, 29(5), 63-67

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