Blog Trolls
A "troll"-collective referring to themselves amongst other names as "Cassandra" is apparently haunting certain blog clusters these days, including colleague Jill/txt. The blog Mentalspace has finally decided to silence it: Mentalspace: Blacklist.
"Trolling" is, I guess, an inevitable side-effect of the now widespread "comment"-option in many blogs. You find trolls in virtual communities, in listservs and forums; they are, it sadly appears, as natural a part of online life, as obnoxious people are a part of off-line life. "Gagging" or blacklisting them are often used means to deal with them in virtual communities. Yet, as Dibbell's oft quoted story on A Rape in Cyberspace shows, it is also often the "trolls", the disturbers of the peace, who challenge and strengthen a particular virtual community and make the community take actions, which also help, in one way or other, establish the sense of a more traditional community of insiders and outsiders; and which also encourage the development of new tools to deal with the offenders.

As is, I think, each blogger has her or his individual right to make the offenders "shut up", especially entities like Cassandra which appears to be plain evil with no sense of humour (I've seen C's comments and they are vicious). Just because you host a blog at something which can be considered a "public space", it doesn't mean you have to accept someone verbally abusing you, just as you have the right to take measures against verbal abuse targeted at you in any form of public space in the non-digital world. Hopefully, in a digital space, there are in fact more ways of dealing with offenders than in non-digital life.

From a cybersociological point of view, it will, however, be interesting to see how trolls will affect the emergence of blog clusters/communities and how they will effect the further development of blog managing tools.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 14:48