Waste of Technology

The internet is an example of how far we, as human beings, have progressed over the course of our history.  We live in an age where technology allows us to talk to people across the country as if they were in the room with you.  We live in an age where a person can order a product from another country and get it faster than it would take them to go out to a store and buy one.  Sadly, we do live in an age where people have utilized these powers to only cause harm to others.  

Online trolls are a shame to the technological advancement that we have seen only go uphill and reach peaks beyond comprehension.  Of all the possibilities we can achieve with this technology, people are using it to take steps backwards and engage in activities that harm others.  They deliberately seek the destruction of another person’s feelings and even put effort into making people’s lives harder.  Whether or not these people have a reason for their behavior should not be justified because they are essentially fighting fire with fire, but those who initiate it on their own simply provide the firewood and throw in a match, while each viewer and responder helps the flame grow larger and larger until it is impossible to control.  Once it gets to that point, there is no way of putting out the fire, so people sit must and wait until the flames burn out, like in Lindy West’s Article What Happened When I Confronted My Cruellest Troll, she states that to trolls, “the message is: you are outnumbered.  The message is: we’ll stop when you’re gone.”

Since the limits of technological innovation are endless and the internet slowly diminishes the barriers of time and distance, the amount of hatred and negativity also appears as endless as people have focused on making that environment prevalent enough to become a topic for a high school class discussion.  The ability of being anonymous online is one huge contribution to the idea of barriers being diminished, because there is no way to stop the continuation of these acts .  There is also no limit to the content that is transported over the internet, because it takes away the option of pointing fingers.  As Farhad Manjoo’s mentions the staff of Jezebel, a feminist news website, in his article Web Trolls Winning as Incivility Increases, he repeats that finding a troll is, “like playing Whac-a-Mole with a sociopathic Hydra.”  Anonymous or not, people still say things online that would never be said in person, because a face-to-face encounter is never a consideration.  

A very general example is Twitter.  I personally have decided to just remove myself from the environment that Twitter creates, and nothing bad has even happened to me on Twitter.  There are so many people on Twitter that fight for the stupidest reasons and say horrible things about people they had a casual conversation with the day before.  Since they are not there to see a person’s reaction, they have grown numb to the consideration of their feelings.  I have seen it with my own eyes and it is scary how far people are willing to go to win an argument with someone or call someone out about something.  

The internet is amazing and can do more tasks than ever imagined.  People can just remove themselves from situations and be safe from problems such as trolls if they take steps to not make themselves vulnerable, and not feed the trolls with responses, because it is exactly what they want.  Internet trolls will only keep doing what they are doing until they get bored with it, and if no one responds to them.  The fight against trolls can be won if people take away their incentive.  Until then, people will continue to fuel the satisfaction of trolls as they destroy more lives and hurt more feelings, but some day we will get it.  There is hope.