Derek Powazek: Three Tales of Trolls
Tuesday, August 12th, 2008
Derek Powazek has an interesting post: Three Tales of Trolls which, for those of you who have not followed the evolution of this term, gives a nice back story on situations that are influencing its more modern meaning.
Troll (internet) on Wikipedia.
The Thomas Hawk - SF/MOMA incident is a fascinating situation in that it covers a lot of territory, including how fast someone like Hawk can get a blog post to go viral.
To be clear, I’m not saying Hawk was wrong in any of these cases. I’m just saying that when you keep being the victim in stories like this, one has to wonder if you may be trolling for a conflict.
I like Derek’s take on it and this gives us a new use for the term “troll.” Troll was initially analog: fishing boats trolling for shrimp, then digital: Nikon trolls causing problems in Canon forums, and now we’re on to both analog and digital: trolling (looking) for a conflict and then inciting digital trolls to go viral with the story, causing an enormous lynch mob.
I hadn’t seen the MOMA/SF incident - unbelievable! He does seem to have a penchant for trouble, but being a well known, active photographer who is not going to go without a fight, it is likely that he is going to have incidents!
Jon, the question is, does he make the trouble by going into situations that are problematic just so he can have some meat to blog about? Given Derek’s other links, I’d say it looks like it.