"Trolling" is a fascinating concept on the internet. It's an odd amalgamation of many different concepts. The indignance people have when they call someone a troll - which means among other things "an odious person" - is, I think, mostly because of a defense mechanism people are experiencing on the internet. In the late 1990s... there came to be a serious problem on the internet of all kinds of untruisms being bandied about along with all kinds of insane types of blogging. Internet users have become very zealous about the judging the veracity of those things which they read. In this way an exposure to more information makes people better critical thinkers. This is why I am very glad of this information age, and the types of initiatives you see at wikipedia. People who have a centralized media - like north america had in the 1900s - become very sheeplike - "sheeple" is the cuss word that is bandied about on the internet these days. In other words, people tend to start adopting an ethic of reasoning according to consensus. Folks in the usa, for instance, look around and see whatever most people seem to believe, and adopt that worldview. (Yes, people are pretty dumb, here in the usa). And that is just not good for a society, overall. I think that such societies are putting themselves at risk for really big errors in judgement (such as electing president bush jr the 43rd for two terms). The internet therefore, is giving us a new generation of avid critical thinkers - folks who question everything, and who can find other people on the internet who also have seen these issues in a different light than their parents did.

But when you see folks yelling about "trolling" - there are other kinds of complex social dynamics wrapped up in that situation.

There are certain people who, in the late 1990s and in the first decade, were and are going about and making trouble and being rude on internet discussion forums and in blog comment threads. These people actively try to push people's buttons. They use heavy sarcasm in order to get a reaction from others. They can quickly destroy the health of a community which is based solely on words, if their antics aren't kept in check.

Also young budding intellectuals would sometimes tell others that they "troll" discussion forums. These people have very cool and outside-the-box ideas and models that they don't feel secure about yet. They just want to float these ideas and see if they can find others who might also have seen issues from this perspective. I think that these young men and women do a disservice to themselves when they describe themselves in this way. Their inductive reasoning is a valuable addition to a discussion, and does not cause problems at all. The only problem I've seen is when more mature adults want to harp on their spelling and grammar. One can see outbursts then, when the young woman or man can get very petulant because of personal insecurity. It's really ungracious for older adults to call youths' outside-the-box ideas "crazy." It's not a funny jest to poke fun at wordy young people in this way. The problem is, that it's like crushing a young flower under your foot. That person will invariably lose faith in all of her ideas, and go through a really dark time in her life. And then we as a society lose years and possibly decades of this person's service - time she would have otherwise used to benefit us.

Finally, the staid and prudish scientific community in the anglophone world has its hackles raised when too many people on the internet start questioning their research and collegiate ideas through inductive reasoning of their own. This is a serious front of contention on the internet in this first decade. There are a lot of holes in current scientific thought - where the practitioners have their nose so close into the research that they miss seeing the forest for the trees. And collegiate types are beginning to worry about their future careers, I believe, given that everybody can publish a blog page these days, and question anything which they'd like to.