The anatomy of a troll

I receive few if any comments on my blog postings. Depending on the subject some posts get more views. And most are generated by a search, a search not for me or this blog but for something that I wrote about, which may have betrayed their search into uncovering.

So a lot end up reading about my MTurk piece perhaps for their own reasons or because they too have a beef with this Todd Dickerson fellow. And a lot end up looking for a passage from "With the Old Breed," which I quoted extensively and purposely to share the horror of war from the point of view of one sane man.

And then I get those rare posts that begin by contradicting me, and then conjure a piece of information out of their hazy awareness and pass it off as fact. I give you this:

Dave Hendrick was responding to a post I made about the Sifl and Olly show back when I was living in Muncie, Indiana, and still wrestling the academic ghosts that had possessed my body and mind. It was a lot of hogwash and dime story theorizing, but one thing I did get right was the dialogue that I included from a particular segment of that particular show.

In short, what Dave Hendrick stated was inaccurate. I checked and double checked the video of this segment and found that, indeed, Olly never says, "Well, you're a bock." See here:

Instead what Dave Hendrick does is invoke an alternate past, which allows him to assert his epistemic correctness about this past. In doing so, he then uses this assertion to insert a clever joke that did not exist in the original segment. It has several important organs: an assertion or dispute about a factual inaccuracy conjured by the poster, a follow-up word-related joke, and an assessment that reveals the underlying language structure that explains the joke's potency. In this case, the poster, Dave Hendrick uses his understanding of puns to reconstruct the Sifl and Olly segment to insert a joke about box being the plural of bock, which is never done but which could have been and which also could have been quite funny.

And that's the anatomy of a troll; it comes out of the randomness of word association and information management that punctuates online interaction. It stands upon a foundation understood and accurate--a theory about jokes--so that it only retains fidelity to its world, while it trespasses in yours.

The troll is an inescapable aspect of online interaction. Anytime someone becomes a blowhard someone will be quick to poach the perceived limelight and try to focus attention elsewhere. The easiest tack is to disagree with another and conjure up a convincingly accurate alternate version. Because owing to the information management and word association required to manage an online persona most are going to be won over by the logical argument and not seek out the information that is simply a search away. Information is performative.