In 1995, the veteran Australian feminist Dale Spender published a book entitled Nattering on the Net, written, in part, to encourage women to engage with a new phenomenon known as 'the internet'.
But Spender felt obliged to issue a warning. 'There is no female who has worked on a networked system', she said, 'who has not been subjected to harassment, flaming or other intimidatory tactics.'
Spender's comments shed a different light on recent debates about online commenters. In a Guardian article this month, Jessica Valenti said more publications should abandon the practice of enabling reader comments, noting the 'never-ending stream of derision that women, people of colour and other marginalised communities endure'. Her piece prompted considerable debate, with Guardian journalist Katherine Murphy writing a rebuttal and Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams agreeing with Valenti.
Yet, when discussing the undeniably toxic nature of so much online culture, it's all too easy to slip into a rhetoric of decline. Valenti writes that 'as the internet and audiences grew, so did the bile'. The argument implies that the internet was once less bigoted and vicious — when in fact, as Spender's book reminds us, the trolls have been there since the start.
The common perception of trolls is that they are outsiders descending on a particular platform in order to wreck it. But in her 2015 book This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things — an in-depth scholarly examination of hardcore, self-identifying trolls — Mercer University liberal studies professor Whitney Phillips cautions against such an understanding.
Instead, she contends, 'trolls are born of and embedded within dominant institutions and tropes, which are every bit as damaging as the trolls' most disruptive behaviours'.
It's not just that they're technically adept, making 'expert use of the creative tools provided by the internet'. It's also that they identify and exploit society's fault lines (gender, race etc.) so that they can effectively provoke a reaction from their targets.
As a result, there's no simple response to trolling, since 'condemning these symptoms without addressing their ideological roots is unlikely to yield meaningful and truly transformative answers, no more so than putting a bandage over a broken arm is likely to set the fractured bone'.
On successful blogs, an initial post often facilitates extended debates among readers, who return again and again to engage with each other. When newspapers and magazines adopted commenting, many did so thinking they'd acquire bloggy interactivity on the cheap.
That was an illusion. Running a successful blog involves a huge commitment of time