Five years ago, I wrote a little piece called "The Curse of the Internet" and posted it here on my site. It focused on how the Internet comes with a price: while it has linked the world like never before and provides us with uncountable benefits, it is also a showcase for a vast multitude of vile, petty, and devastatingly unintelligent people. And wait a minute - are all people like this, under the surface? Does the anonymity of the internet encourage us to let out the monster within?

I had wanted to rewrite this piece for some time, but I was never quite sure what exactly I wanted to say or how to say it.

Just recently, I watched an audience-less episode of the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, in which Craig spent the entire hour interviewing Stephen Fry. For my money, he couldn't have picked anyone better to interview in such a setting. Stephen Fry is, to me, one of the most ideal human beings to have ever been produced by our meager little species. I always find myself hanging on his every word, no matter what he's talking about. And when he actually mentioned doing something that I have begun to do all the time...something I never even contemplated other people doing...I suddenly realized how I wanted to rewrite "The Curse of the Internet".

For centuries, the word "troll" brought to mind hulking, fearsome, humanoid creatures that originated in Norse mythology. And while that image is certainly still attached to the word, there's a relatively new breed of creature also referred to as a troll. Here is Wikipedia's definition:

An internet term for a person who willfully, through obscene, offensive or hateful actions (a.k.a. "trolling"), attempts to disrupt a community or garner reactions, attention and controversy.

For me, it's actually even simpler than that - while everything in this definition is true, I also find that a troll is a person who will say anything, no matter how ugly, merely for the sake of making his/her opinion heard. This person might never even come back to the said message board to glance through the reactions.

Stephen Fry brought up the subject of trolls and talked about how it has become almost impossible for him to look at something on-line (something which is followed up by public comments) without forcing himself not to even glance at these comments, because "people will be saying such vile things." He was adamant about never advocating censorship - he thinks having an open society is very important - but it was clear that this widespread population of trolls saddens him.

I was so glad to hear him say this, because just at the end of last year, I decided I would never again glance at the comments beneath an on-line article or anything similar because I couldn't stand reading the horrible things people would say. I avoid message boards like the plague. I won't even read customer reviews for books or movies on sites like Amazon. True enough, in an "ignorance is bliss" type of way, this has actually made me happier.

But, as irony would have it, it also makes me sad that I'm happier simply by avoiding human beings, and I imagine Stephen Fry must feel similarly.

To me, the most unsettling part of all is trying to deduce the ratio of trolls to non-trolls...because I swear, it really is starting to feel that our population is troll heavy. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, no matter how judgmental that opinion might be, but what does one really get out of posting a nasty, cruel, and hateful comment just for the sake of injecting a bit more venom into the world? Really, what do you get out of stating that you're happy over a particular celebrity's tragic death? What do you get out of going to a movie message board and stating that "this movie sucks - if you like it, you're a complete retard"? What do you get out of...no, I've got to stop listing examples, otherwise I'll be going on forever.

And now I am left at a quandary, just as I was five years ago, because I feel there should be some solution or at least some minor step towards a solution. But there's none that I can see. I honestly think that many trolls don't even realize what they're doing - they never stop to think that a single post, a single harsh word, can darken someone else's day...someone they've never even met. And if they did stop to think about this, would they care? It's all part of this enormous sense of apathy that haunts the human race and is, quite possibly, our greatest fault.

...why aren't there more Stephen Frys in the world?