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Needless to say it takes quite a bit to get me out from behind my rock, but the latest discussions flying around about trolling and the very high profile effects that they can have has nudged me just a little.

Of course trolling is around. It's been around forever. It's not just the high-profile celebrities that get hit. About 5 or so years ago AustCrime's started being hammered by a systematic campaign of personal trolling. And in the early days, until I got my blocking / filtering / binning / auto-discard act together some of the things that were being said were enough to make your hair curl. They were pointed, often involved citing my home address, they were profoundly personal. They were also pathetic, small-minded, tiresome, tedious and frankly stupid. True anonomity on the web requires brains. That sort of brain rarely engages in the sort of mindless play that these morons revel in.

But let's face it - it's all because I post book reviews. All because I posted book reviews on books written by Australian authors.

That's it. But that, it seems, is enough these days.

Sure a lot of trolls are all about the "look at me factor", but a hell of a lot of them are also all about shutting you down, stopping the "competition", belitting, and generally making life tedious.

Nowadays I'm aware that the campaign is ongoing, not because I read the crap, but because I keep numbers of how many comments / emails / contact attempts are made. Luckily I've not got a pre-packaged blog site, the CMS that I base AustCrime on has a lot of tools (and I use them all) that automagically enable me to analyse the pattern of behaviour and bit-bin the crud before it gets through. I moderate what few comments make it in, use an email kill file, I'm becoming increasingly fond of "block" on social media.

I can really understand the impulse that exists to out some of the crap that gets sent your way - which I believe is what's happening a bit on things like Twitter etc. I've been thinking about this but to me, after all these years of Internet interactivity, personally I still think blocking / bit-bucketing / ignoring the small minded losers who want to make your life a day to day misery because, well let's face it - no lives - no balls - no brains.

But it does have an effect, and yes I personally post reviews in a strictly limited number of places, and only where I've got some control over the outcome, but I don't do opinion pieces and I don't do commentary or much in the way of social media because of it. Okay well I also don't do much in the way of social media participation because I'm very twitchy about my privacy and a certain level of over-exposure to ... well everything really.

But, I very much agree with something I saw in an article by Catherine Deveny - "my feed - my choice".

So troll away by all means, but remember I don't see what you're saying and I don't give a rats what you're saying. The only sort of shit I shovel these days grows fabulous pumpkins ....

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Submitted by Karen on Mon, 03/09/2012 - 07:09 pm