Nov. 6 Blog

In class we have been learning about another aspect of the internet community; Flaming and Trolling.
Flaming is regarding obscene and inflammatory text in that people will target someone and base all of their anger at them. We learned that the common outcomes/response to a person flaming is by signing off, not participating, or the user that is flaming will be removed.
Trolling is another aspect of the internet chat community and is very similar to flaming but much different. Trolling is when someone is intentionally disrupting an online community, where as flaming was targeting one specific user. Both of these methods are used to pretty much try and create chaos in internet chat forums.
In lab today we listened to a person talk about her experience with trolls. She commented on how they can be very rude, mean, and all around hurtful.  She pointed out that people who troll and partake in flaming typically stay behind their keyboards and won't actually approach or even say what they type in real life. However she spent much of her time talking about one specific troll that hurt her in a very serious way, but who she also ended up talking to in real life; something that is very rare.  She talked about how he used the recent death of her father to get under her skin, it worked, and how he knew that doing this was solely to hurt her. She asked him why he had wanted to be like that, and his response was pretty much she spoke to powerfully for a woman.

I constantly come across trolls and people flaming almost every day. I am a big sports guy and love to read ESPN and other sports articles.  I always go to the comment section to see what others felt about the article or the teams/players being addressed in the article. I will routinely come across roughly 10-12 trolls per article, it is a very big thing. These people typically don't get any replies because everyone has gotten so used to them.