Everyone's encountered it in one form or another. In cyberspace these days, you can't pick up a cookie without running into a shadowy pocket of it, intruding on your internet experience like so much salt and bready table crumbs.
This creature has its hands in every online cookie jar. It's expanded to the point that even the brightly lit central byways and forums of the internet have noticed the creeping infestation and begun to implement preventative measures.
I'm speaking, of course, of the faceless, motherless, many-tentacled monster of internet anonymity. Seen most often in comments on YouTube or news articles, this apparition presents itself as an angry, overtly bigoted polemic on whatever issue is in vogue.
(By that I only mean whatever is most topical; I often find Vogue to be sorely lacking in coverage of these types of pertinent issues.)
And while this infestation has thus far proven to be a substantial obstacle to civil cyber discourse, it is a beast with many different sides — and not all of them are wholly negative. In fact, some of them might be manifestly positive.
Now I won't try to redeem that modern experiment we call "trolling," where real people spend their time gallivanting through the internet like a 20th century Russian composer, concerned only with provoking a swift, visceral response from those they encounter.
But outside of these trolls — and those pseudo-trolls who are actually sincerely expressing their unsavory perspectives — there are others who use this impersonalized force for good.
Without fear of social retribution, those others are free to say those things and ask those questions that are normally silenced by acculturated taboos.
Wandering through Yahoo Answers, it's clear that the principal benefactors of this are middle school boys curious about "How long is long enough?" But there are many less grossly pubescent things that people ask that they otherwise wouldn't be able to.
Is it okay if I shower with my cousin?
Does baby powder smell bad?
Do all toenails smell like poop when you cut them, or am I gross?
All real, important questions that people would otherwise have to bottle up inside. That's only the lighthearted beginning — when asking these questions makes people feel a little more confident and secure in themselves, protecting them from a little inconvenience and embarrassment.
But for every 20-year-old college male who wants to find out if he's using soap right, there's another individual who desperately needs to know there are others like him out there, that he is not alone.
Whether he's dealing with abuse of any sort or a nascent mental illness, this anonymity helps him feel comfortable sharing — potentially giving him a safe path out of silence and stigmatized repression.
Might this be worth a troll or two?
http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2013/01/comfort-in-the-nameless-mob
