Posted by Ted Hopton on August 3, 2008
I’d heard and basically understood the term “troll” for a long time, but this long NYT magazine article, The Trolls Among Us, provided an enlightening look at the underside of human behavior with technology. Here’s the article’s definition of “troll“:
In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word “troll” to denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities.
Here’s a glimpse of how this aberrant community thinks:
| “Lulz” is how trolls keep score. A corruption of “LOL” or “laugh out loud,” “lulz” means the joy of disrupting another’s emotional equilibrium. “Lulz is watching someone lose their mind at their computer 2,000 miles away while you chat with friends and laugh,” said one ex-troll who, like many people I contacted, refused to disclose his legal identity. |
The author interviews and stays with several prominent trolls, showing what they are like in person as opposed to the way they act online. While that is interesting on one level, I liked more the exploration of what the prevalence of trolls says about human beings and society. For example:
| Does free speech tend to move toward the truth or away from it? When does it evolve into a better collective understanding? When does it collapse into the Babel of trolling, the pointless and eristic game of talking the other guy into crying “uncle”? Is the effort to control what’s said always a form of censorship, or might certain rules be compatible with our notions of free speech? |
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Posted in Ethics, Human Interest | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Ted Hopton on August 3, 2008
I remember being terrified of jellyfish when I was a small child, but I don’t think I ever actually was stung by one. This NYT article about the dramatic increase in jellyfish along shorelines around the world is worrisome not just from a tourism standpoint. When nature sends us a message as loud as this one, we’d better listen. There’s no simple answer, of course — there never is to big problems.
Let’s just add it to the long list of daunting challenges we are facing these days…
| “These jellyfish near shore are a message the sea is sending us saying, ‘Look how badly you are treating me,’” said Dr. Josep-Mara Gili, a leading jellyfish expert, who has studied them at the Institute of Marine Sciences of the Spanish National Research Council in Barcelona for more than 20 years. |
| The explosion of jellyfish populations, scientists say, reflects a combination of severe overfishing of natural predators, like tuna, sharks and swordfish; rising sea temperatures caused in part by global warming; and pollution that has depleted oxygen levels in coastal shallows. |
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Posted in Animals, Environment, Outdoors, Science, Travel, Trends | Leave a Comment »
