Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton frequently catches a bad rap for being cold, off-putting and generally unpleasant. Many news sources and pundits have opined that she just doesn’t have the people skills that her husband Bill possesses. Naturally, she’s been trying to fight this image but all the PR in the world can’t compete with the awesome power of the internet. Case in point:

As far as I know, this picture is real. But a picture like this just doesn’t sit around for long. Smelling blood in the water, the Goons over at the SomethingAwful forums went to town photoshopping this into oblivion. That thread has material that may not be safe for work.

Regardless of your feelings about the junior senator of New York, you have to admit her image problem isn’t going to go away anytime soon. These are a few of my favorites.

When most people get home from work, class, a hardy night of drinking, whatever, they usually want to kick back and unwind, and different people have different means of doing this (that should be fairly obvious enough, right?). Some people snack on junk food while watching TV, some go for a run, some take a nap, and some catch up on their Facebook stalking. Some people, like me, use the Internet as a way to unwind. And this isn’t a fairly new or fascinating phenomenon or anything, I mean someone out there has to be watching all those YouTube videos and forwarding those e-mails about the bad luck in love you’ll endure if you don’t forward them back. What I often find myself doing, however, can be summed up in the following image macro:

I think in this picture I represent the braying ass more than I do the little Asian girl, to be quite honest.

I surf Internet community sites such as Livejournal or Deviantart.com (an art community site) looking for interesting or entertaining “conversations” to have. Conversations is in quotes because while some online discussions I engage in are more along the lines of casual, friendly dialog or well thought-out, genuine debates, most often divulge into train wrecks of mud-slinging between Internet users caught on either side of an irresolvable issue. And these types of arguments are, needless to say, pure lulz.

In my experience of engaging in these types of discussions and developing an e-reputation at sites I most often frequent, I have been called a “troll” on more than one occasion. On Sheezyart.com, a site that began as an experiment by two business students as an interactive art community but has since then deteriorated into a children’s cartoon site, I was even banned from their forums on the grounds of trolling. I have been called a troll for correcting people’s grammar and spelling mistakes, bumping threads (meaning I comment in a forum topic to bring that topic to the top of the list again) to revive moot arguments, posing counter-arguments against threads in which everyone is in overall agreement on the subject, and ‘following’ users from a given forum or community to their personal blog/site and beginning a new argument with them there.

Are all these acts really trolling? The problem in identifying a troll is knowing exactly what a troll is. Trolls are usually described as people who participate in online communities for the sole purpose of harassing or otherwise riling up its members. The term comes both from the mythical creature, something ugly and offensive that hides under bridges to come out and hit people with a big stick, and from the practice of ‘trolling’ a lure, in which a fisherman puts food on a hook and waits for fish to bite. So do these definitions describe my online behavior? Or am I someone who simply loves debate and considers being able to counter someone’s argument and maintain that argument as an enjoyable intellectual activity?

Obviously my bias lends toward the latter, but given how people have reacted to me this might not be true in all cases. Fairly recently I was called a troll when I followed someone who had an anti-Chief Livejournal icon to their personal blog and responded to a post they wrote about the Chief issue. I don’t describe myself as being pro- or anti-Chief, however I do have some opinion regarding how people discuss the issue, and I brought this up in this user’s post. A debate ensued, in which both of us used factual backing for our arguments (as opposed to a petty bout of opinion) until ultimately she (the journal’s owner) stopped the discussion short and insisted I was a troll for following her to her journal and beginning a argument on her blog. I responded that this wasn’t the case, because her journal was open to the public and she had every option of blocking me. She reconsidered, and the debate continued up until this happened:

(Click to enlarge)

Ouch. That’s what I get for being in a community like Drama_Awesome. Long story short, we sorted out this issue too after I convinced her that I really wasn’t going to make a big deal to some lulz community like Drama_Awesome about our private debate— it was just for us to discuss the Chief and just because I was interested.

Being called a troll can be both an honor and a disgrace. On the honor side, people acknowledge your ability to predict people’s emotions and get them riled up in that way, to maintain an argument against any offenders no matter what that argument is, and overall to give everyone a good laugh about it. On the disgrace side, people consider you a loser who sits around online all day and gets off on harassing people over inane issues, and generally gives people who come to forums to find friendship and have a conversation about something they’re interested in a bad experience.

Thoughts on trolling (or what is perceived as trolling) within a community usually depend on the attitude of the site that hosts the community. I wanted to bring this up because a few instances of trolling (some from myself on a lesser degree, I’ll admit) have been appearing on dailyillini.com in various forms, most notably in user “Sagatious”‘ response to the retirement of the Chief. Is this necessarily a bad thing? Why have posts like these been appearing on dailyillini.com? I believe this is because dailyillini.com, with its current lay-out and commenting feature, is still fairly new. This means people coming to the site will react to it the same they would other communities (online or otherwise) that they’re familiar with, and this includes myself. While I would say that most people are taking advantage of dailyillini.com’s commenting feature in a positive way to discuss campus issues with their fellow students, some are bringing in pre-existing modes of behavior from other sites they frequent and speaking their mind in whatever belligerent and inflammatory way they choose, often because they know exactly how to get their fellow students riled up on issues they know equally well.

Different online communities exist for different modes of discussion, and I strongly believe that dailyillini.com has the potential to become a medium for students to discuss and debate with one another their thoughts on issues that affect our campus, and I think that students who use dailyillini.com should push for this direction. Until this type of unspoken agreement about the purpose of an online community can be reached, trolls like Sagacious (and even me, if you think I deserve to be placed in that category) will appear and continue to test the waters…and the people in them.

Are trolls bad for a community? More specifically, are trolls bad for dailyillini.com? I think this entirely depends on how dailyillini.com develops as a medium of discussion for students, what types of trolls might appear as a result, and how the community will want to react to those trolls, be it by taking their bait or through administrative banning.

Suffice it to say, I really do believe dailyillini.com has the potential to become an online community for students in the way I described, and in that respects it might help to define the type of discourse allowed in the community. Should users be allowed to comment for the sole purpose of pointing out a grammatical error and insinuating stupidity on behalf of the writer because of these errors? Should users be able to write an entire page’s worth of anti-white bashing? Should users like me be allowed to start arguments with people, sincere or otherwise, for the fun of it?

What will you be using dailyillini.com for? Are you a troll?

Everyone knows that a picture is worth a thousand words. Most students whose favorite Internet haunts include Facebook and CollegeHumor know this especially. But how much is a picture worth that already has words written on it?

According to my roommates, not very much. In my many surfs through the ‘net I have picked up hundreds of funny images that some other online user has edited with his/her limited photoshop skills to add some fitting text. When I posted one of these such pictures on my door, my roommates all confessed to me that they didn’t understand the joke at all. In fact, they didn’t find any part of the picture amusing in the least. This of course made me quite sad, and looking at the picture again I realized that there was so much going on in it that ‘normal’ people wouldn’t understand. Therefore, on behalf of my roommates, I present to you the picture in question as well as an explanation of why it is lulz.

An image like this is known as an “image macro”. Wikipedia, (NSFW&g Encyclopedia Dramatica and a number of other sites claim the origin of this term comes from the SomethingAwful forums where pre-designated text, known as a macro, could be typed that would result in an image being displayed. It soon became common practice in forums and image-hosting sites all over the Internet to post amusing images, most commonly of their pets with all too human-like expressions on their faces, and for other users to pick these images up and edit them with some sort of caption.

The caption written on the image usually refers to some pre-existing concept or phenomenon on the Internet, also known as a meme. A meme, in short, is sort of like an inside joke for the Internet. Basically when one image, event, person or thing becomes really popular, more and more people start spreading knowledge about this item to one another to the point that its history or meaning no longer needs to be explained, and this new meme can be brought up in any situation and people will understand the meaning and humor. In the photo above, there are a number of memes at play here:

1.) Cats. Cats are probably the biggest meme on the Internet to date. It would take me another 5 pages worth of blogging to explain the entire reason why this is, but all you need to know is that cats make crazy expressions and do silly things, and cat owners supply the Internet at large with enough photos of their beloved Fluffy for everyone to add macro-captions on a hundred times over. Some famous cat memes include Limecat, Longcat, Ceilingcat, Monorailcat, and the Treachery Afoot cats.

2.) “Moar”. The Internet is full of young, hyperactive, undereducated and unskilled typists who, while already are incapable of correctly spelling half the words in the English language, manage to brutally mangle up the other half for not knowing how to navigate a keyboard. Thus, misspelling in of itself is a popular meme, and certain misspellings become so essential in forum posts that using the correct spelling will actually get you laughed at. One such word is the misspelling of the word ‘more’, “moar”. Moar has gained its popularity in many forums when one user posts something interesting or desirable to look at (usually links to porn, unsurprisingly) and everyone who responds after demands ‘moar!’

3.) CAPSLOCK. A common expression meme on the Internet is “CAPSLOCK IS CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL”. This comes from mocking Internet users who try to draw attention to themselves or express their anger by using capslock. Image macros commonly use capslock in their captions to draw on the hilarity and ridiculousness that capslock entails.

4.) Internets. If you go into a web forum and talk about the ‘Internet’, you will usually be corrected that it is really the Internets. This meme comes from the ever eloquent George Bush who said, during the Bush-Kerry debates, “I hear there’s rumors on the, uh…Internets!” Since then, frequenters of the Internet will insist that there is more than one Internet, and that they are all connected by “a series of tubes”.

So what is this image macro saying? I posted this image on my door to poke fun at my Internet addiction while at the same time using many of the very ideas and expressions that only Internet addicts understand to highlight the extent of that addiction. Is an image macro worth a thousand words? I guess not. But is it worth one blog post? I’ll let you decide.

If you ever dare to venture away from the safe, culturally-understandable confines of Facebook and take a look into the world of online drama, I promise you will be grateful for the big, steaming pile of lulz available to you at the click of a button almost every day.

What is lulz? Lulz of course comes from the acronym lol, meaning “laugh out loud”. While lol is usually read as “ell-oh-ell”, pronounced as a word you get “lawl” or “lul”. On the Internet, where everything is a misspelled, bastardization of the English language, the pluralization of this term becomes lulz.

Lulz is most commonly used in the expression “I did it for the lulz”. This usually refers to deliberate trolling behavior intended to harass Internet users for the amusement of others. World of Warcraft once became Internet-known for this, when a man and a woman fell in love on the game, and after many quests and creating a guild together the man asked the woman to marry him. She agreed, but the night before she planned to fly out to see him in real life for the first time, she confessed to him that she was really a man, and their entire relationship was a sham. Devastated, the man asked why someone would do something so terrible as this, and his answer was only “I did it for the lulz”.*

Lulz isn’t limited to deceitful acts of trolling. Lulz can commonly be found all over the Internet, most commonly on Anime/Furry art forums or in the blogs of pre-pubescent ‘emo’ girls. Drama_Awesome, a livejournal community, posts weekly (if not daily) updates regarding the various drama to be found on the ‘net and invites its members to partake in the lulz. Most of the drama presented in this community comes from forum members of various sites who begin a debate about whatever but later divulge into a trainwreck of insults, correcting each others’ typos and grammatical errors and accusing each other of the same hypocrisy they practice in their posting (also referred to as saying “NO U”, but this and other expressions will be discussed in a later blog). As such incidents suggest, lulz is commonly found among Internet users who overextend what limited knowledge they have and show themselves for the ignorant lulz-factories they are.

Lulz is also not limited to events on the Internet. For example, the recent death of Anna Nicole Smith has generated intense amount of lulz from a variety of sites, many pulling up as many unflattering pictures of her as possible and speculating over the many reasons, real or otherwise, why she might have died. However, it should be noted that as an Internet concept, lulz can only be used and discussed on the Internet. Also, lulz that occurs on the Internet is always greater than lulz that happens in real life. Even Micheal Richard’s tirrade on “n****rs” did not generate the amount of online lulz that many an Internet phenomenon has. How Internet phenomenons develop and how they generate lulz will also be discussed in a later blog, so fear not if you are a bit confused.

Is lulz insenstive? Mean? Perhaps. What people find funny in real life is often filtered through a veil of what society deems socially acceptable or not. Even among your group of close friends, there are often some things you just don’t joke about for the fear or courtesy of offending someone over something personal. But on the Internet, other than what rules a webmaster or server host lays down for a particular site, its users are free to discuss whatever they want and joke about whatever they want. Perhaps it is for this exact reason that users online will push the limits of humor and overstep any social boundaries, often by using racist and sexist jokes in the most inappropriate situations. On the Internet, where there is almost always a safe and non-visual distance between the harmer and the one harmed, lulzing over every bit of harsh (yet arguably funny) information is more acceptible. Thus, lulz was born on the Internet, and on the Internet it shall remain.

People often ask me why I deleted my Facebook account and yet manage to spend hours on end surfing the ‘net and typing away. I’m doing it for the lulz. This is probably difficult if not impossible for some of you, who only get your lulz from the likes of Facebook and CollegeHumor, to understand, but my hope with my portion of this blog is to enlighten the campus at large about the inner goings-on of the Internet and the many subcultures that form as a result. My hope is to share all the lulz the Internet has to offer so that one day you’ll be doing it for the lulz too.

Stay tuned for my next post when I’ll be discussing memes.

*This, and much of the other information on lulz presented in this article, was found on the Internet culture documentation site (warning: not safe for work) EncyclopediaDramatica.com. Information on this site is not always permanent, as the site is a wiki open for any editing.