Those are all very good questions and insights, and absolutely worthy of a response. Thank you for giving me the opportunity.
You are right. Trolls are also people. So are murderers and rapists. Research shows that trolls are malicious and psychopathic. They are not nice people.
Trolls are not nice people. It’s not about them being disenfranchised, etc. There has been quite a bit of research and they gravitate towards the dark triad in behavior. That’s who they are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_triad#
A good writer can certainly be provocative, but a good writer can also just explain something so clearly that someone can understand something that they never understood before – no provocation required. A good writer is simply someone who is easy to understand and interesting to read. 😊 That doesn’t mean that what they right is honest, but really bad people can be good writers. 😊
Writing was certainly one way in the old days. However, letters to the editor, at one point in my life, earned me a lot of money. If you google my portfolio, you will see that I always won the letter of the week or the letter of the month. Every publication had a letters to the editor section, and only that best got published. Those letters would often dispute what the writers and publication would say, and they in turn would get responses. It was a far slower process than what we have today, and nowhere near as good as we have today. But it was there!
You are certainly correct that writing is a form of communication, and true communication requires a dialogue, but when a writer gets 160 responses every hour, it’s simply not possible for the writer to communicate with everybody who responds. That happened to me in May. This last month was a little easier, but please bear in mind, I don’t only write on this platform. I write on others, and I’m also an author with books. A writer only has so much time, and it really isn’t possible to reply to everybody who comments.
I have had people trolling me for the full 27 years I have been on the web. If you decide not to respond, they call you a coward, and tell you that the reason you don’t respond is because you’re an intellectual coward. If it’s happening to me, it’s happening to others. The article was written for those writers will feel compelled to respond. They’re being manipulated. Do you mean less views or less reads. I don’t care. I’ve been writing (and published) for 60 years. If someone doesn’t want to read me because I don’t have the time or the inclination to respond to them, so be it. It is not a requirement that a writer responds to a reader. Imagine if J.K. Rowling or James Patterson had to respond to every single reader that wrote to them. It’s actually impossible timewise.
With regard to your pleasure at comments, there is a difference between us. I am a professional writer. This is what I do for a living. And I’ve been doing it a very long time. I have had tens of thousands of comments in my life time, and while I have always tried to respond, I’ve long realized, it’s impossible to respond to them all. Sometimes it’s necessary for a writer or a creator to switch off comments. That’s generally because of the level of abuse. For instance, while I generally allow all people to access me through messenger on Twitter, Quora, or Facebook, I’ve had to switch it off recently. In another few months, I’ll open it again.
I think you have a good point that there is an absence of emotional and intellectual reciprocity in our real lives. I think you’re wrong that writers and viewers are co-creating memes and reality. Writers are doing nothing of the sort. Social networking is, and those people who are not professional writers are writing more as social networkers than as any form of professional writing.
The difference is that people like me write for a living. We do not write in order to obtain emotional and intellectual satisfaction. We are writing for money. We are writing to bring information that changes the world. We are writing to entertain. But we do not write for emotional and intellectual fulfilment from other people. That’s what a lot of social networking is about. And that’s why there is also so much anger from people who feel entitled to get it from strangers, and they are not given it.
I do not believe in individual sovereignty. We are a social species, and we have survived to date as a result of cooperation and working together. So I’m not quite sure what you mean by your comment.
The best to you.
