The trolls we despise are our own creation

To kill off the poisonous notions of celebrity, we have to stop giving it our attention and act civilly to each other.

She is the scarecrow that embodies everything we use to keep our morals flapping above the fields of indignity. With celebrity culture, the glitz of Hollywood has lit up long dormant beasts in each of us: because they’re on the big screen, they’re deserving of our vitriol, of our scorn. But we no longer direct rotten fruit at them, but rotten terms: Too fat, too skinny, cheater, liar, weirdo, skank, whore, drug addict, stupid, bimbo, loser, airhead, meaningless. Terms most of us left in the schoolyard, replacing them with conduct catered to civility and, indeed, common decency, are somehow allowed rebirth and fruition to be used at these idols of our indulgences, these effigies to narcissism.

Yet, those of us who casually and so easily mock the failings of young women we do not know, or largely harmless men with admittedly weird religions, are also quick to shake our fists and heads at rude online comments and bizarre blog threads; we are outraged at the targeting of people for making the mistake of, for example, reviewing technology or being a woman and having an open comment thread on the internet.

When we turn off the screen, a black monitor greets us with a darkened face and we have an answer. Do we even realise the casualness with which we dismiss celebrities as idiots, bimbos, wash-ups, has-beens, irrelevant? This ignorance on our part of targeting people who are, in fact, complete strangers – just more famous ones than online writers – is itself part of the problem. We’ve casually allowed for this environment of trolling, of harassment, because so many of us do it. We’ve built a culture of mockery, a religion of ridicule, where we drink the spirits of vitriol down parched throats, raw from directed anger. And we wonder where these ‘new’ beasts come from.

We created them. We’ve produced an environment where people like Charlotte Dawson attempt suicide because strangers on Twitter had direct access to someone they’d otherwise never be able to reach. Technology may be bringing us together, but no one ought to assume this is always a good thing. Celebrities and people on television have always been the target of casual hatred, of comments that dismiss them as persons with actual emotions, instead of entities flickering on a screen, or smiling from a glossy magazine; all that’s changed is Twitter and blogs and forums have allowed us to air talk that would’ve quickly evaporated at dinners and barbeques into a permanent format: often in ways allowing us to aim our hate directly at the celebrity in question, as with Dawson.

We like to think we’re better than celebrities: these entities with no emotions, these scarecrows of our own design, with the expensive smiles and poor judgements. They’re not real like our friends, our lovers, our families, we think, they exist in some other world beyond our mere mortal grasp. While this is true to some extent, it’s no reason to treat them with casual hatred and quick dismissals: if we really are better than them, surely that means we should demonstrate it, in not allowing even casual hatred to be a property we have. It’s easy to create scarecrows from the threads the screen provides, from the weird behaviour picked apart by gossip columnists, by the tiny increase in bulges etched into eternity by paparazzi; it’s much harder to fight against this machine that manufactures celebrities out of ordinary people, fed by screaming passion of voyeuristic indulgence.

In a global society increasingly growing weary of gods, we’ve become lax to a religion that creates them all the time, demanding the sacrifice of our decency.

There are multiple ways to make places like the internet and society in general a space in which adult discussion can occur. There are ways to combat the influence pundits, who sprout fallacies and untruths, have on political discourse in the most powerful countries in the world. One way is to grow a stable foundation of our own discourse. It’s to reclaim civility in a consistent way. It’s to say we’re better than this, we’re better than the hype machine, we’re better than the trolls.

There will always be strange people doing harmless things, always be celebrities who say nonsense like Paris Hilton and her homophobic ideas; but our passion and our anger are better served elsewhere than on strangers – no matter how big-named they are.

Celebrity does not imply talent. Celebrity is only made by attention. We should start killing the notion of “celebrity”, replacing it with actual talent, actual ability. But to do that requires us to stop giving attention, to stop hurting our own humanity as moral beings: we’ve got to act civil – ie read and engage charitably, begin with some measure of respect, until such time as interlocutors do not reciprocate or demonstrate deserving of it, and so on.

If we can’t even maintain a modicum of respect for a rather harmless young woman like Paris Hilton, is it any wonder we fail in facilitating proper dialogue on important matters with our opponents?