Years of exposure to the Web allowed me to know more about the different entities that characterize it. I have been particularly a frequent visitors of online forums, where users get to freely exchange ideas and arguments without having to reveal their personal identities.
Ideally, it's all about intelligent discourse and exchange of ideas, experiences, and good opinion. Fortunately or unfortunately, however, there are those entities that we call internet trolls, called such for their failure to stay on-topic and give intelligent responses. I've had the misfortune to meet some of them during my stay in these forums. They are those people who discredit and insult one user for no apparent reason--just that they want to annoy. Some of them even go to very low tactics like changing user names to appear like there are more of them.
As for the origin of these trolls in the Internet, I really have no idea. I think they are more than a decade in existence already, probably as old as the Web itself. The anonymity of it all pushed these characters to shell out another one.
According to Judith Donath, an expert on cyberspace culture, trolls come out to play the game of identity deception, albeit without the consent of other concerned parties. She said that in the physical world, it is a must to unite the body with the identity. They cannot be separated. In the Web, this is a different matter. A person can come out as a troll with a disagreeable personality in the Web whereas in the physical world, this is not obvious.
Trolls can be damaging to an Internet conversation, no doubt. They can disrupt current discussions, disseminate trust, and even destroy trust and credibility in that group. A group, which has become sensitized to much trolling may even declare any out-of-topic response as trolling, which may not be necessary.
With those troll descriptions already mentioned, can we say that there's a troll in all of us? Precisely because anonymity is liberating? Perhaps there is.
