Listening to the episode of “This American Life” where Linda West talks about being harassed online by many, many people she and others label “trolls”. Most of these trolls do nothing more than try to either harass or talk about you on message boards, comment sections on various websites or directly write you inflammatory material and send it to your email. Ms. West had a different encounter when the troll she had not only dug up more personal material of her life, knowing of the recent death of her Jazz musician father for example and starting Twitter and Gmail accounts contacted her while pretending to be him, but he also eventually felt so terrible after reading of her reaction to his actions that he sent an apology.

It’s an interesting piece that on top of him getting back in contact with her, he then agrees to do an interview with her about why he became her stalker or a stalker in general. He stated he mainly choose her because she was overweight and she defended it and spoke out for people accepting of different body images. He felt angered by it, partially because he was 75 pounds’ overweight at the time. But also more so because she was a woman who spoke her mind and seemed to not care what others thought of her. He later admits that he feels he was a misogynist in a round about way. The troll then stated he was in a low point on his life where he was overweight, lost his girlfriend, spent everyday at a computer at an unfulfilling job. He then states he found a new girlfriend, enrolled in graduate school and started teaching children. Due to these things he felt better about himself and then stopped trolling not only Linda West but others as well. He also admits to having harassed her under different aliases and sending her numerous messages from many accounts.

I was think while listening to this is there was anyway to directly encounter one’s anonymous internet trolls or stalkers. Could you email or reply to each one in a way that they would see you more as a human and less as an object? Is this truly the only example of this type of thing happening, troll and person being trolled reconciling, in the almost 25-year history of mainstream internet? It’s certainly an interesting story and one that we can possibly use when we ourselves may find ourselves being harassed by online stalkers.

When trying to reason or debate with someone who hate or dissents to your own opinion it’s always best to do so in person. But since the days of chatrooms and online journals of the 1990s to social sites and journals evolving into blogs by our current time we have become more and more connected to other people, but much less so in a personal way. Can we regain the pre-information age discourse of debate and having both parties know one another, or will we continue to become more and more disconnected to the point where even more serious social issues and political outcomes are argued over with venomous discourse which drives the public opinion on such issues? Only a time traveler will know for sure, but hopefully we can regain more of a civil discourse and not let those who publically project superiority while feeling insecure personally completely dictate our own personal future or the future of connected societies as a whole.