| XY - Men, Women, and Internet Trolls - Winter 08/09 |
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| Written by Gord Sellar | |||||||
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Why are dysfunctional internet users so often men? I've been thinking about trolls lately. Not the giant, stinky, goat-eating creatures that live under fairytale bridges. I mean the lowest of the low in terms of the internet ecology: the people who go around writing nasty comments on other peoples' websites, mailing lists, discussion boards, and blogs. About a year ago, an ex-schoolmate of mine from middle school started trolling on my website--over a wholly imagined slight, in fact--and filled the comments section of my blog with all kinds of passive-aggressive, rude nonsense. I began to ask myself how he could have become this kind of person. After all, a troll spends hundreds of hours a month online, posting rude, insulting, or nasty comments for no other purpose than to sow discord and derail genuine social interaction in the hopes that it will decay into fights, recriminations, and bursts of self defense. It's the online equivalent of throwing rocks at someone, saying, "Ha! You flinched!" and then waiting for them to start chasing you so they'll end up out of breath. In other words, trolling is, at bottom, a manipulative social behaviour. Now, trolls are usually clever. Not intelligent, per se, but clever. They often know enough to avoid being tracked down and outed. However, I suppose when their main hobby is surfing around posting nasty comments on websites, they tend to get caught and outed no matter what kind of feeble attempts at anonymity they start out with. After a few times being caught and spanked, they usually develop a level of paranoia suitable to their sort of behaviour and hide behind all kinds of anonymity software, pseudonyms, and even multiple fake IDs that they use to support and promote their various alter egos. Online, these fake IDs are called sock puppets, for obvious reasons. You'll hear people say something like, "Nora is a sock puppet of Kushibo," and that means that someone who originally gave his name as "Kushibo" created a secondary identity, "Nora," for the purposes of supporting anything that "Kushibo" says. Some trolls will create a large number of such sock puppets. One fellow well known in the Anglophone blogosphere in Korea reputedly has such a penchant for creating sock puppets that hardly a year goes by before some colourful online character--a half-Korean lesbian Republican in the USA, a half-Japanese Korean man studying in Hawaii, a Korean lawyer who emigrated to California as an adult--is outed as a sock puppet of the same loony guy. What I've always found interesting is how almost every troll I've ever seen outed this way was a man and how often these male trolls have taken it upon themselves to create female sock puppets. Of course, all of this raises the implied question of why men are so much more prone to trolling online, or, perhaps, the inverse: why do so few women become internet trolls? Not to say that women don't also go weird online, but the few cases I've encountered have more often involved flaky emotional dependency on (or dominance of) "virtual communities," online expressions of offline obsessions, and things like that. Often, it's much less manipulative than what we see among predominantly male trolls, although, yes, of course, a few women certainly go trolling as well.  Photo: Sarah Stefanson This brings to mind the phrase "social engineering." I first encountered the term in Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown, where he defines it, loosely, as, "fast-talk, fake-outs, impersonation, conning, [and] scamming." Social engineering was a major skill among hackers, phone phreaks, and other groups in the electronic underground back in the 1980s and 90s. You can get only so much information by hacking a system, but if you can employ social engineering, you can get information more safely, faster, and much more easily. A phone call here, an instant message there, and suddenly, you have access to the local university mainframe! That was what social engineering was about among hackers, who, you guessed it, were overwhelmingly male. Women engage in social engineering too, of course, but they are less prone to pioneer its use in mastering new technologies. Sterling even points out how far back this goes. When Bell put the first phone systems online, the people who originally worked as operators were those perceived (by Mr. Bell) to have the nimblest fingers and quickest minds: young boys. When young boys did what we all expect young boys to do (pulling pranks on the job such as connecting a priest's call, not to the bishop's home, but instead to the local brothel), then it was out with the boys...and in with the young lady switchboard operators more familiar to us from film and TV, if not from memory. When I read that story, I couldn't help but wonder why the young women didn't pull the very same pranks. Sure, some operators have been known to listen in on calls, but overall, the model we have of female operators remained relatively stable until their work was simply automated. Why did young male operators consistently do a much worse job than female operators? Well, riffing on sociobiology, it makes me think of the kinds of sociality that humans excel at. While we are also inherently taxonomic and hierarchic thinkers--we naturally put things into categories and into hierarchies of various kinds--the evolutionary roots of our sociality may play an important role in how we relate to one another and to machines. After all, the internet is not just a social construct: it is a socio-technological construct. That is, it is simultaneously a social network and a technological object--a social group and a tool. This opens up a very interesting set of questions about how humans relate to their tools. In her book The Meme Machine (2000), memeticist Susan Blackmore argues that tool use, language, and many other human behaviours all link up to a fundamentally important human skill: imitation. Just as how the way certain birds arrange their nests helps show off traits not otherwise apparent, but important to potential mates, humans show off hidden skills in everyday actions. People who can sing well, or dance well, or debate politics well, show off not only their musical talent, their coordination, or their savvy, they also display how well they are able to synthesize and imitate impressive and codified behaviours of other human beings whom they have observed. Innovation has been a very small edge throughout much of human history. Skillful imitation has mostly carried the day. Some even suggest the reason men have dominated the fine arts in most civilizations is not because they've suppressed women's creativity (although, yes, they have), but because the creation of beauty is, along with the accumulation of power or displays of physical dominance, very deeply hardwired into the male sexual psyche, as means of securing a mate. Indeed, it is from this competitive, hierarchic drive in primates, tied so deeply to male sexuality, that the (human) male propensity for violence seems to spring. After all, no matter how much we may like to argue that socialization is what creates gender, there is also sex and inborn sex traits. Hormones, psychology, and our relative physical advantages all conspire to make this the case, but the relevant portion of this for the discussion of trolls is, of course, psychology. As reprehensible as violence is on an ethical level, when we think about evolution, we need to consider the adaptiveness, the fitness, of any trait or behaviour. We need to think about how male primates, including humans, use violence. When we ask that question, the inevitable answer is that human males use violence to subjugate others, to assert their own primacy within a group or context. Anyone who has spent time around quarterbacks and cheerleaders can testify that this technique remains because, in a certain sense, it works. This maps very interestingly onto the idea of the internet as a tool. After all, if imitation is important, this applies not only to tool-making--flint knapping, wood-carving, or whatever--but also to tool-use. Outstanding tool mastery, like outstanding peer-group mastery, is a trait we're hardwired to revere, respect, or at least to notice.The better a hunter excels at using a tool, the more likely tool use will be beneficial. A better speak thrower is a better breadwinner, for example. Imitation is at the heart of tool mastery, for everyone learns how to throw a spear, shoot an arrow, fire a rifle, or design a website. We cannot say that this is exclusively the domain of men, of course (it isn't), but even today, there are far more men than women interested in getting their hands into the real guts of the internet and manipulating computer technology for purposes other than those originally intended...that is, of using it as a complex multifunctional tool, rather than only a medium of social interaction. The problem is, I think, that I was wrong earlier: the internet is not simultaneously a social network and a technological object. Rather, it is some kind of new thing that contains elements of both, as well as new traits that did not exist in either, at least not to the same degree. As much as members of mailing lists may contend that their group is a "community," it is not a community in many fundamental ways. As much as some people might regard the internet as a big, cold machine, it is also the funhouse mirror of the human psyche and the biggest collection of human creativity and thought (inane and otherwise) on our planet. When we look at the internet, the majority of us humans, male and female alike, see a weird, complex smear blending technological and social elements: a strange blurring of tool and social group. But perhaps, here, among the dysfunctional outliers, biology may play a role in which direction the oddballs default towards. When they do engage with the internet dysfunctionally, men and women do it differently. Perhaps because they default into social interaction mode, this tiny minority of women trolls begin seeking relationships online, oblivious to the fact that mediated by machines, these relationships cannot help but fail to fulfill their social needs. Males, on the other hand, when they dysfunctionally engage with the internet, seem predominantly to default to tool mastery mode, and somehow map this mode of engagement onto social relationships as well, in the same way some thugs think violence can be used to solve any problem. Throw in the relative anonymity of the net, and you have a recipe for manipulative trolls...mostly of the male variety, mostly of the sort who are expressing that instinct in a niche where physical prowess and actual tool-mastery need not factor in. Maybe. I haven't been able to find a single academic or scientific study of gender and dysfunctional relationships with the internet, let alone the sociobiology of this phenomenon. Plenty of other human dysfunctions, though, are well known to manifest in sex-differentiated ways: depression is much more prevalent among women and sociopathy and even plain old violence is more common among men. Perhaps gender stereotypes affect how readily children of each sex take to the net, though I doubt that now, but once they're online, it seems likely that biological sex is a much bigger determinant of how they behave when things go, mentally, wrong. Comments (2)
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