Trolls on the Internet

essaysbysean.blogspot.com 

Hello Reader,

Got creepy trolls?

That’s a creepy topic, so let me ease into it, gradual-like, and end with trolls getting what they deserve. Ha!

Everyone knows the Wired World is flat…

Yes, the World Web is flat, and as screen pages about funny cats streak across the continent on fiber optics at the speed of light, everybody, all over North America, must by jealous at all the good-looking housewife millionaires right here in Calgary. Jealous, I say. I see the ladies on my computer whenever I am looking at Ten Reasons to Look at Celebrities and Five Things You Didn’t Know About Star Wars.

Actually, you’ll see those same housewives if you live in Dallas, appearing on your computer as Dallas housewife make millions from her home, and you can too! Yes, and you can click too, and then have targeted ads following you around cyberspace. It seems there are squares left in the computer template for local advertisements. This is according to my computer professor, Tom Keenan. He recently searched the Internet for renting a car in Vancouver, and now ads are popping up offering car rentals with his exact dates for his trip. The exact dates! Companies are making money, Keenan says, by sharing with each other their data about you and me. Oh my. All the better to target you with ads, my dear.

I learned about this from a one-day Continuing Education class by Keenan, based on his book Technocreep subtitled The surrender of privacy and the capitalization of intimacy. I am recommending his book to you, although I haven’t even read it yet, because his class was real good.

Wow, technocreep. Creepy. Got trolls?

After class I drove downhill to the bohemian part of town to a coffee shop. There I could read the Globe and Mail for free. In the sports section, page S9, Saturday Nov 5, is a happy and sad story by Lori Ewing about Canada’s fastest woman marathoner, Lanni Marchant. Happy: Marchant’s a practicing criminal lawyer, over age thirty, and “she was invited to the House of Commons to speak on girls and women in sport.” Lanni Marchant made some good points about her sport being objective, no subjective judging. She meant that instead of office politics, or a focus on your race, religion or creed, winning is very clear. She said, “It didn’t matter what you looked like crossing the finish line.”

Sad: “A week later she was angrily defending her point. It seems more than a few people missed it entirely.” The trolls talked about her running uniform. “Risque” they said. Note: The Reuters photo in the Globe looks fine to me—and I’m living in the Bible belt. “They even picked her apart for a pair of Instagram photos of herself in a cocktail dress.” I can’t comment on any such dress: Here on the prairies, I’ve never been to a cocktail party in my life—but I did taste a martini once, during the winter Olympics.

I won’t quote the whole article, or all the troll stuff, but as Marchant said, “It’s pretty ugly, there are some pretty dirty things, it’s pretty vulgar, it’s pretty disgusting. And I hope that none of the men and women who are commenting on there have daughters.”

I sipped my coffee. I thought. I don’t know about you, but when I picture a troll, I see a male, overweight, poorly groomed, on a shabby old couch. I suppose such guys would be jealous of anyone who is more than a decade past high school yet still remains in good shape. In the coffee shop I got talking with a slightly older couple, grandparents from Edmonton, and like me they took Lanni Marchant’s side. I told them how a baseball player got revenge on trolls. They were impressed. I will explain:

Advice to team: Don’t read comments Such is the headline before me to a Calgary Herald sports section story from page E4, March 27, 2015, by Sam Cole. As I would, Cole eases into things gradually, starting with some amusing paragraphs about the atrocious spelling of ignorant trolls, noting: One day scholars will delve into whether, somehow, the root causes of the troll’s rage has sprung from his “inability to distinguish between there, their and they’re, your and you’re, its and it’s. That must be it.”

Cole looks at Jill Officer, on a Winnipeg Olympic-champion curling team. Her team (joking)

QUOTE …had the unmitigated gall to lose to Switzerland in the final of last week’s world championship…. the now-inevitable spate of vitriolic comments, and made her wonder why. What drives these people?

Does it make them feel better to rub salt into an open wound? Do they think she and Jones, Kaitlyn Lawes and Dawn McEwen weren’t trying? “It’s pretty common knowledge that losing sucks,” Officer wrote. “Our team knows that and so do our fans… But…I am left wondering why here are still those few people who sit behind the mask of their computers and insist on being rude, mean and downright hurtful to not only us, but anyone who lives in the public eye. UNQUOTE

A ways into his article Cole writes, “But prolonged exposure to the stupidity and crassness of the trolls is a depressing reminder that there are a lot of sadistic dimwits in the world, with too much time on their hands. It’s better not to know what the lunkheads are saying, although there is a second option…”

Cole reports that “former Major League pitching star Curt Schilling tweeted congratulations to his 17-year old daughter on being accepted into college and starting her softball career. …(His tweet drew) a series of obscene, sexually explicit tweets from various males, stating what they would do, or like to do, to his underage daughter.”

So Schilling tracked them down and “published their names and occupations in a 1,700-word essay with the subtitle: ‘There are repercussions to your actions in the real world.’ Some were students at the college. He got them suspended, or kicked out. Some were adults. He got at least one man fired.”

I’m glad. I might be a fancy writer who takes a smart one-day university class, but I’m no guilty white liberal: I can muster no sympathy for trolls. And neither did the nice grandparents next to me.

It’s a small world: The grandmother was taking a course in Edmonton from Shirley Serviss (sic) about essay writing. And she had seen me read at the (Princess) Alexandra Writers Centre about three years ago. So she wrote down my website address. That very night my blog acquired a new follower. I wonder if it was her?

Sean Crawford

November

Calgary

2016

Footnotes:

~Twitter is important now, as noted in my essay Twenty-Five Blogs. (Archived October 2016) Tweets, and other social media too, although not very lengthy, have overtaken blogs.

~Here is a TV screen of the baseball guy, being phone interviewed by a man in headphones, explaining his position in depth. The blue link to his lengthy blog essay is a little ways below the screen.

~For copy editors, when leaving a “wrong word” in a story, the Latin (sic) can stand for: Said In Copy.

For my essay today, the term (sic) stands for: Spelled In Conversation.

Universities Are No Longer Normal

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello reader,

Climbed any ivory towers lately?

I may have been open to having my views shaken up during my youthful campus years, but these days it’s hard for me to believe in change. For example, several times I have read in Canadian sources that marijuana is no longer the weak stuff of the 1960’s, but instead is several times more powerful. (And more damaging to growing brains, too) I read this, but then I have trouble retaining it.

Similarly, I have trouble with Clay Shirky’s evidence that U.S. universities have been getting several times more weaker since the early 1960’s. “Surely not!” I say. Yah, but there’s evidence. Here’s the link to Shirky’s essay. Scroll past his two journalism essays, down to his next "The End of Higher Education's Golden Age" blog post.

Apparently, what we in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains think of as a “normal” university down in the States is in fact confined to those few household names that we have heard of even out here in the west. So forget movies like The Mona Lisa Smile and The Paper Chase, and students being on a noble quest with intellectual talks over coffee about “life, the universe and everything.” Forget the TV show with excited undergrads talking about their exciting learning in the background while a sad Buffy Summers, the vampire slayer, as a nonstudent, enviously visits her friend’s college. The average real world campus is just not that good, the students not that committed. At least, not in the States.

In fact, my own Canadian degree is (at least) equal to a U.S. masters degree. This is according to my professors. They said they will attend North American conferences for professors of rehabilitation, where they find that, even if they show the course outlines for our degree, the U.S. profs re-e-e-eally don’t want to admit that our undergraduate program is better.  

What staggered me was reading how only a minority of teachers are real professors, and how only a minority have tenure. As a worker in community disabilities this disturbs me because research findings for achieving abstract equal rights, or even for such concrete equal rights as curb cuts for strollers and wheelchairs, require “speaking truth to power.”  

For all sorts of citizenship things, you need freedom to speak… and publish. A professor from the U.S. spoke to us at a “weekend” rehabilitation conference. I remember two things about him: First, he was courteous enough to use bar graphs, instantly understandable, rather that simply put up numbers that I would have needed to translate in my head. Second, I recall the story he told us about why he criticized a big institution for persons with disabilities—and what happened next.

Turns out the institute board of directors included prominent people, including a household name TV journalist whom I will not reveal here. Given that institutions are not a growth industry, I guess the hurt was to their vanity, not to their incomes. Some of the board angrily went to the State Governor and said, “We want him fired!” The governor went to the president of the university, saying, “I want him fired!” Who went to the faculty head, “I want him fired!” who softly, sadly replied, “I can’t fire him. He has tenure.” Just imagine if the poor professor had researched the U.S. occupation, intended for the purpose of “teaching democracy,” in Iraq.

So yes, even in this enlightened age, we still need tenure to protect freedom of speech. Maybe the best of us, such as those two 2016 U.S. presidential candidates, would not be corrupted by power, would never act or speak vindictively, but surely others of lesser rank are not so noble. (joke)

In North America, the broken trust between ivory tower and high school, as regards English marks, means all high school graduates must take a “bonehead English” test before the semester even starts. In Canada, this goes back to the 1970’s: I remember getting into community college just under the wire. Years later I remember avoiding a waste of time and money —they charged a day’s net pay for their English test! — by going to the registrar clutching a bunch of my student newspaper clippings.

At the same time, the old days of students dropping a full letter grade average from high school as they went up to the big leagues seems to have been dropped. And high schools now seem far easier, with far fewer dropouts than in my day. I remember just once in Canada—because it was too controversial—seeing a university ad campaign to attract high school kids with only a C+ average. (A boy and girl in jeans were bent far over, saying 65% saves you a seat!) Yes, but a full grade drop would put them at D+.   

My own campus used to be a three year degree, like in Britain or (I hear) like certain degrees in the province next door: The fourth year was added not to the top, but to the bottom, according to the Vice President Academic, as “a high school make up year.” Well. Can we creatively use that fact? Can we creatively use our intuition that many students do not go to university to  “get educated” or to “find themselves,” or to appreciate their time/space location in the world, but instead merely go to the campus to “get a job”? Can we creatively meet these modern needs?

I am not convinced folks graduating from university in the U.S. have achieved effective open mindedness, not enough for considering such questions. Too bad, because it is clear from reading Shirky that the trend of ever-larger enrollment and caretaking, (and ever lower I.Q’s) without ever-larger funding, means that something has to give. Seriously. Universities have changed like marijuana, and the good old days are gone, gone, gone.

Sean Crawford

Fall

2016

Footnotes:

~Warning: Furey’s column (see headnote) can raise your blood pressure. It has several links, but I still haven’t aggravated myself by reading any. Here’s Furey’s link.

~The U.S. situation concerns me because, as with so many trends, Canada follows along behind. For example, U.S. universities initiated grade inflation during the 1960’s to help students to stay in school where they couldn’t be drafted—but the inflation was retained after the conflict was over. Now, in Canada, I have it on good authority (not from the V-P) that a certain local faculty gives an average mark not of C, but of C+.

~I was part of the university chaplain center. We met formally with the Vice President Academic once a year. It was at one of those meetings that she told us about the added fourth year.

Here's from Tobias Wolfe being interviewed in The Missouri Review:

Two days ago, I gave an hour’s lecture on Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan nych, ” a very important story. Two-thirds of these young people are going to go into the sciences, in one way or another—medicine, computers, physics. They’re not going to be humanists, at least not by occupation. This is a chance to help them frame questions about themselves, to help them learn the habit of questioning what they do, how they’re spending their lives. And there’s no better story for raising these questions than “Ivan Ilych.”

I feel like I’m doing something in the world that’s a good thing to do, when I’m doing that. I would miss it.