Trolling

**Trolls? or just dumb n00bs?**
//By: Maciej Derulski//

Ever just do random stupid things to stir controversy and enjoy the reactions? Or maybe do something incredibly dumb, thinking your cool and open the floodgate of becoming famous for all the wrong reasons? Either way, whether its intentional and satisfied some weird need, or your strategic social value is much lower then you think; you are a troll.

Ok, not you, unless of course your main purpose in owning a monitor with a computer plugged into it is for its shielding purposes. Godspeed. It's amazing the things some people will say anonymously (or not) in random turfs of the Web. This behavior even predates the Web. Lets go back to IRC, the ghetto alleys of the Internet as I like to call it. And by ghetto, I mean the connotation that Jay-Z and Biggie Smalls type of people give it. Here, a place where one needs to be tough, alert, and generally not troll the wrong people, or some elaborate bot-net swarms you. You're offline for 3 months. These guys don't wear their trousers down to their ankles, quite the opposite. As a matter of fact, some of them probably rarely leave the basement, and half the time don't know if its sunny, raining, or snowing. But dangerous with keyboards. Don't act like a noob, even if you are one. This was our social network in 1992.

Then the Web came along. You know what the most significant consequence of this was? It brought in a lot of noobs, in such large numbers it stopped making sense. For a while, no one really noticed them, but then they started posting in forums and on discussion boards; building 'identities'. The IRC crowd thought this was lame. And it's really too bad, because this is the same group of people that know how to open and close your CD-ROM drive remotely, and could have, in part, propelled the development of the Web*. Things like YouTube and Facebook may have came sooner.

The advent of YouTube has taken trolling to entirely new levels. It's one thing to make an idiot of yourself using text in some chat room, but by attaching your face to the one of your dumbest accomplishments and adding it to YouTube; is the real life social equivalent of [fill in the blank] on a GLOBAL scale! I'd rather some hacker flash hardcore pornography onto my screen while frying my CPU remotely and I'm sitting in Second Cup with a hot chick using my computer. At least I'd get a laugh out of it. Ok, then there was ChristianU2Uber and JoshU2Uber.

Let's take trolling into the real world. Well actually, the Internet is also real, as it does exists in your life. Away from keyboard (AFK) is more appropriate. This is going to require three people, one is going to have a camera. Two of them, will board a public transit bus, one will have a concealed video camera. The third person, who is at home probably on Facebook, will call the second person. Confused? Sorry, person one is camera dude, person two is the brave one with a cell phone on the bus, and the third is a slacking procrastinator who has the easiest job of calling person two at a specific moment. What will happen is the brave person will sit down beside some elderly lady for example, while camera dude is recording both. Major procrastinator will call the brave one. Then, our brave soldier will begin to talk about inappropriate things, that should probably not be overheard in public. Things like what you did with your girlfriend last night, in more detail than necessary. Or how you tried crack and it was better than sliced bread. He will also be one of those obnoxious types that feels everyone on the bus is interested in their phone conversation. The idea is to get a crazy reaction from the elderly person and get it all on tape. Sure this sounds offending, and we wouldn't do it if there are children on the bus, but some random dudes phone conversation never really hurt anyone. Unless of course they talk on cell phones when driving. Don't do that, think of the kids.
 * Meme Idea:**

//Ironically, today, most of these IRC types have active Facebook profiles, and have moved on to geeky things that can be monetized. They grew up. But this scene is far from dead. Also, although allot of this stuff is true (but exaggerated for satire), most people on IRC are nice, just be cool. IRC is actually a good place to get real-time help from professionals in the field, the vast majority of users are not malicious script kiddies.//

//*Many IRC users are professionals in some IT field, and did contribute to developing the Web, among many other thing.////