What Can We Learn From Trolls?

WHAT ARE TROLLS?

Trolls were the underdogs of Scandinavian children’s literature, almost adorably ugly creatures who lived under bridges and whose bark was usually worse than their bite. Nowadays they’re also an internet phenomenon, armed with computers instead of wooden clubs, who growl when you cross the bridge into an online forum like LBT and seem to do their best to stir up trouble wherever they go. A troll that you rooted for while reading a J.R. Tolkien novel is much more fun than the one who answers your serious forum posting with a response designed to inspire fear, confusion, or panic (or all three, and apparently for his own entertainment), and it’s mighty hard to get away from them. Just when you think the last one has been vanquished, he pops up again with a new name and avatar, but using the same old attention-getting tricks.

Since I had the misfortune of spending my childhood with a pesty younger brother on my tail, I feel that I ought to be able to deal with trolls. About the time my brother learned to walk (all too soon), he turned from my darling little baby doll into my personal troll, and he devoted a great deal of energy (of which he had an endless supply) to making my life miserable. My mom’s advice for me was invariably this: “Just ignore him and he’ll stop.”

That’s good advice, in theory anyway. I was never able to use it effectively with my brother, and I’ve made many other attempts to use it since I left home at age 17. Every job, club, church and community I’ve belonged to since then has had its own resident trolls. Sometimes ignoring them worked, other times not.

The age of the internet has transformed the lives of many trolls. They no longer have to wait until dusk to creep up out of the sewer or jump at you from behind a tree. Using the almost-perfect anonymity of the internet, they’ve created identities that seem to express the worst of their characters while giving meaning and purpose to an otherwise drab life. They’re quite a lot like the Wizard of Oz – a very smart but socially-disadvantaged wizard who seems big and important and powerful but is actually a nerd standing behind a curtain. And as freedom of speech issues burn ever brighter in the vast world of the internet, I personally don’t expect the trolls to go away. They may actually thrive and multiply. My grandfather, who was a kind and mild-mannered attorney (I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but it’s true), would probably tell me to save my ammunition for issues that I have a prayer of affecting and leave the big, thorny ones to someone else.

It won’t surprise you to hear that my brother has now, in his fifth decade of life, advanced to the level of Grand Poobah of Internet Trolls. Of course, he doesn’t call himself a troll, but he brags to me about online forum behavior that would instantly activate the Troll Alarm here on LBT. And while he devotes himself to stoking the fire under a vile, bubbling cauldron of politics, racism and 999 other ingredients of hatred in online forums I hope never to visit, I spend my time running my own virtual mouth in the forums here on LBT. Am I better than him, or just the same? It’s not for me to judge, is it? I’m hardly objective about this. It’s taken me decades to be able survive a five-minute phone conversation with my brother without having to hang up screaming. In a sense, the “ignore him” strategy has helped me get this far, not because ignoring him makes him stop but because it creates enough white noise to neutralize most of the vitriol I hear. At this point, it’s a blessing to be able to hear at least 10 calm and reasonable words from him while 1000 nasty ones buzz in the background.

And that brings me (finally) to the take-home message of this article. It’s a lesson about how to hear and listen in a very noisy world of virtual and physical voices, a lesson about what we can learn from dealing with trolls.

SAY THAT AGAIN?

Although I fervently believe that I’m not a troll, the world of the internet is extremely important to me because it helps me connect with a world of friends and acquaintances that I might otherwise never have the privilege to know. The keys on my keyboard, and the text that magically appears on computer screens in my house and in the houses and workplaces of thousands of other people all over the world, are invaluable to me because I am hearing-impaired.

In 1985, a hearing test required by my employer of all new hires (because our operation included noisy manufacturing equipment) showed significant hearing loss. I was 32 then and shrugged it off, but as the years went by, I suspected that my hearing was getting worse, and a hearing test in 2010 showed that I have moderate to severe hearing loss in the high frequency range (especially women’s and children’s voices). I’m not totally deaf, but the impairment is bad enough to turn even basic communication into a very frustrating (especially at my retail job) and difficult experience because even when I can hear a person’s voice, I can’t hear it well enough to understand what the person is saying. So instead of a simple string of words, what I hear is not words but noise, or what I call “word soup.”

Also, if I can’t see a person, I can’t hear them, so that customers who come up behind me or summon me from behind a display fixture are likely to think I’m purposely ignoring them. Background noise, like the store “musak”, makes it even harder for me to hear properly, and I end up asking a person to repeat themselves 3 or 4 times, which is probably very frustrating for the poor customer who urgently needs directions to the restroom. Trying to get and decipher the answer to a question of my own is even more frustrating.

It took me over a year to accumulate $3000 for the hearing aids I needed. After wearing them for just 2 weeks, I was amazed by them. Thanks to those tiny, marvelous gadgets, I can hear things I hadn’t heard for a long, long time, and things that I’d never heard before at all. The difference was so dramatic, I had to wonder how much harm my hearing impairment has done to my interpersonal relationships, not only in how others perceive me (they think I’m not interested, or ignoring them, when I just can’t hear them) but in how I perceive others. If I’ve understood only a fraction of what they’ve been saying to me, perhaps I don’t know them as well as I thought I did.

HEARING VERSUS LISTENING

At the heart of my personal story of hearing impairment is another story that applies to every human being. Because we are too hurried, overworked, stressed, or whatever, we tend to filter out noises that we don’t have the time or energy to decipher. And when we do slow down enough to hear the whole message, we’re still not going to “get” it unless we actively listen to it.

Another human frailty is the tendency to personalize what we hear from other people. There’s nothing basically wrong with that. When encountering a new person or object or idea, we use the scant information we’ve gathered about it to try and fit it into our own frame of reference – our own experiences and world view. That’s okay until our own frame of reference begins to distort the new data by judging it as good, bad, relevant, irrelevant. It’s okay until our brains say, “I don’t like or understand what I’m hearing, so I’m not going to listen to any more of it.”

We can make some big mistakes by doing that. A few days after I got my hearing aids, I heard a loud crackling noise coming from the kitchen and instantly concluded that the kitchen was on fire. In a panic, I ran out of my study and into the hallway, at which point I saw my husband running water into the stainless steel sink and, by connecting the noise and the sight before me, I realized there was no fire after all and skidded to a stop instead of spraying the room with fire extinguisher foam.

I’ve had a similar experience when communicating with other people in the invisible but powerful world of the internet. I can’t see their faces or read their body language as they “speak” via text on a page. I don’t know most of them personally, have never visited the town they lived in, and don’t know if they speak with a western twang or a southern drawl. I’m blind to their personal histories except for what they choose to mention in a forum post or private message. So when they say something that’s foreign to me or that I don’t like, my so-called logical brain mulls it over and eventually sticks the person’s words in a mental cubbyhole, labeled anything from “stupid” to “crazy.” The next time that person speaks up, my brain already knows how to categorize their words, quickly sends them into the appropriate mental storage area, and moves on to something more interesting or compatible.

Those of us with pet insecurities – and admit it, you have at least one or two of those – also misinterpret other people’s utterances by filling in all of the spaces between the words with our own ideas or our own feelings. So when Jane Doe says, “I hate the Lap-Band,” what I hear is more like, “I hate the Lap-Band and every other person who has one and especially Jean McMillan because she loved hers and wrote a book about it.” The instant I saw those words appear on my computer screen just now, they looked ridiculous to me. While it’s possible that one or two people are indeed thinking that very thing about me, it’s far more likely that their meaning was actually, “I hate my Lap-Band, I’ve had so many problems and disappointments I wish I never got it, and I want to make sure everyone in the universe knows what a bad choice it was for me so they won’t make the same mistake.” To assume that a stranger is talking about me when she’s talking about herself is a serious error in human communication.

IS YOUR LISTENER BROKEN?

Let’s put my hearing and listening speech on pause for a few moments so I can tell you a quick side story. When dealing with our gang of rambunctious dogs, my husband and I can often be heard telling the dogs things like, “Did you hear what I just said?” or “I just told you to….”, just as if they were human instead of canine children. One day I overheard (thanks to my hearing aids) a conversation between my husband and Teddy, who was overly (if understandably) interested in the sacks of groceries I’d just dumped on the kitchen counter.

My husband shouted at Teddy, “Get!” (translation: “Get away from there!”)

Teddy gave him a look that clearly said, “No, no, you don’t understand! There’s a box of Milk Bones in there and it must pass my personal inspection right now!”

And my husband replied, “Teddy, I told you to get! Is your listener broken?”

That’s not just a cute dog story (go to 9dogshowling.blogspot.com if you want more dog stories). There’s a message in there that we could all benefit from if we pay close enough attention. If you don’t like what you’re hearing online here at LBT (or at work, or at home), before you discard it altogether, ask yourself, “Is my listener broken?” Have you made a genuine effort to set aside your own opinions, ideas, and feelings long enough to hear and understand what’s being said? I’m not telling you to tolerate people who are abusive, racist, sexist, sizeist, or any other hateful or harmful behavior. I’m just suggesting that you give the ones you’re uncertain about at least a brief benefit of the doubt. If then you still can’t agree with or understand them, you can ask them questions (neutral, please) to help you understand, or you can just move on.

ARE WE TALKING ABOUT ME, YOU, OR THE MAN ON THE MOON?

My final suggestion for improved internet communication is that you make a conscious effort to draw a boundary between yourself and other people. Without that boundary, you’re going to have a hard time distinguishing between them and you. While it’s lovely to experience sameness or kinship with other people, it’s not so lovely when it means that you end up adopting their negative view as your own. Children are especially susceptible to that, but adults do the same thing. When I was growing up, I heard many, many times (hundreds, thousands, perhaps millions of times) about how brilliantly smart my younger brother was. I spent a lot of time trying to be perfect enough and smart enough to crawl up on the pedestal with him. He consistently kicked me in the face and I ended up believing the family legend that he was a genius and that I therefore was stupid even though I managed to graduate from high school at age 16 and he dropped out when he turned 16.

So if you’re hearing a message that reinforces your own fear that (for example) you chose the “wrong” bariatric surgery procedure, ask yourself first if the other “speaker” is talking about him or herself or about you. Chances are, she doesn’t know you and doesn’t care nearly as much about you as she does about herself. Nothing wrong with that. Most of the time, I, Jean McMillan, am the most important person in the universe. I don’t mean that as an illustration of vanity but rather of self-preservation and survival.

NOW, BACK TO THE TROLLS

So what can we learn from internet trolls? We can learn that what they say tells us more about them than it does about us. We can learn that taking trolls too seriously gives them power over us that they don’t deserve. Our listeners probably don’t work very well when trolls are “speaking”, so that their message comes out as disagreeable and annoying noise…that (again) tells us more about them than it does about us. We can learn that (as surely I’ve proven by now) employing a sense of humor when dealing with trolls can helps us keep things in perspective while at the same time stopping trolls in their tracks because laughter is probably the last thing they want to hear. We can learn that trolls are probably very needy people, hungry to be heard and understood, but without the social skills to get our attention in a healthy, helpful way. And finally we can learn – and this isn’t the fun part – that when 20 people angrily gang up on a single, silly troll, none of us is acting in an admirable fashion. Messageboard moderators are best qualified to deal with troll extermination. Let’s leave that job to them, so we can use our listeners for the really important stuff, like how to succeed with weight loss surgery.