The Age of Trolling

Vice-president Biden speaks at the 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, NC.

? Richard Kalvar/Magnum Photos for Slate.

Read the rest of Slate?s coverage of the Democratic National Convention.

CHARLOTTE, N.C.?Joe Biden?s eyes welled up, bigger-than life on the Time Warner Cable Arena screens. ?We acknowledge the incredible debt we owe to the families??fighting back tears now??of the 6,473 fallen angels.? The Georgia delegate standing next to me sniffed, and took a deep breath to ward off the waterworks. The Democratic strategist on the other side looked vindicated, because up to then, we?d been talking about how the party had been forced to amend its platform language, stuff that voters never seem to care about, because of a media firestorm over its references to Israel.

?This time yesterday,? said the strategist, ?I was sitting in my office and asking: Are we really talking about this? Are people really covering this? It?s over, I guess, but how stupid was that??

Whatever lessons the Democrats take from Charlotte, whatever it did for the president or for the ambitious senators and governors who stalked delegate breakfasts and whispered ?2016,? this is a fact: The convention was successfully trolled.

I don?t use troll in the pejorative sense. Actually, I may be trying to craft a neutral meaning of troll where none previously existed. The term, in its modern Internet usage, refers to people who want to start fights online to bring the universe into an argument on their terms. It comes not from Grimm literature, but from a fishing technique in which multiple lines are baited and dragged to haul in the maximum amount of cold-bloods.

Democrats did not expect to spend Wednesday arguing about the capital of Israel and the appearance of the word ?God? in their platform. There were, reportedly, 15,000 members of the media in Charlotte, of whom maybe 14,980 could have given a damn about the party platform. On Tuesday night, when the Obama campaign and the DNC released its platform, none of the bigfoot media outlets in town spent time on the text.

No, it took until Wednesday morning for Jeff Dunetz, at the YidWithALid blog, to comment that ?Democrats have removed this pro-Israel section from their platform.? (They had removed references to Hamas and references to Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.) At 11:26 a.m., Weekly Standard reporter Daniel Halper published a story on the platform, making the same point. (He credited YidWithALid.)

It could have ended there. But within a few hours, CNN and Fox News were browbeating Democrats to ask why they?d changed the platform?why, too, had they removed an old reference to ?God-given talents,? and thus deleted YHWH from the text? Democrats gave up. They forced a vote on new platform language, restoring the 2008 lines. Convention chairman Antonio Villaraigosa affirmed the change even though nobody?seriously, nobody?thought that the sleepy midday convention hall had given it a two-thirds ?aye? vote.

Maybe the word ?historic? is out of place for the modern convention. To say that they?re clich?d and staged is, in itself, a staged clich?. But who thought, just 11 months after the launch of the Occupy movement, that 99 percenters would have less influence on the platform than conservative media?

This is what I mean: We live in the age of trolling. Any comment made online, if it?s given the right forum, is as relevant as any comment made by some media gatekeeper. Think about a politician or a journalist on Twitter, and what he sees. If a colleague wants to tell him something, it appears in his feed with an @ symbol. If someone who just logged on and wants to bait a nerd logs on, he will send a message that appears with an @ symbol. Both are equally valid, at least in how they appear on-screen or on a phone. There is no ghetto-izing of comments into the bottom of a page, or into media that you don?t pay attention to.

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=b412ee3df96c9a324e9cf81d433b1d87

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