So, with all that jazz about social taboos and offensive subject matter, I can tell you it's left the mods in a bit of peculiar and paradoxical situation. Consider it – we’re all twenty-somethings living in the big city. We’re from a wide-range of different cultural backgrounds and have, for the most part, grown up in open, inclusive, multi-cultural societies. In essence, we’re very aware of social sensitivities; they’ve been bred into our subconscious by years of public education and public service announcements aimed squarely at us.
As young children, the endless messages were beamed right into our heads: play nice, accept others, differences are what make us individually unique, celebrate diversity etc.
I don’t mean to be flippant – clearly this is vital, nay crucial for a society such as our own. However, when I say it was beamed into our heads, please take this as literally as possible. Hell, go a step further: it was drilled into the very essence of our beings.
That being said, we were also raised, as I previously mentioned, by the titans of off-colour comedy. Being from the Internet Age as we are, the adolescent tendency towards rebellion often manifests itself in the youth taking an avid interest in the realm of taboo, and the performers who test the limits of what’s considered appropriate and what issues can be satirized for comedic, perhaps even oddly educational, effect. Comedians like Dennis Leary, Chris Rock, Mitch Hedberg, Bill Hicks, David Cross and Dave Chapelle are largely responsible for really pushing the limits of offensive comedy, but underlying the curses, scatology and perversions lay a wealth of social truths. Satire is mainstream nowadays, as any devotee of Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart or Conan O’Brien would tell you. Consider the content of programs such as Arrested Development or 30 Rock – both mainstream, prime-time programming, and ask yourself if you think you could say the same thing on a mainstream Canadian network at the same time. Ask yourself if any of these comedians or programs could have survived the social censors of the last generation – a mere thirty years ago.
At the end of the day, what you need to realize is that while a bankable comedian can test the limits of vulgarity for effect, the average TXT-TV viewer probably shouldn’t.
After all, that’s why those comedians are called ‘bankable’. What they say has monetary consequences for their sponsors, the networks, the advertisers etc. As professional performers they have a very good idea of where the very thin line lies, and when they tap-dance all over it, they risk everything. There’s a school of thought, perpetuated by the devotees of the Andy Kauffman school of comedy, that suggest that Michael Richard’s racist nightclub rantings of a few years back may in fact have been an act, maybe even a staged act.
All I know is that Kramer crossed a line – nay, leaped over a line – and his career will never recover.
How this relates to Trolls is as follows. Regular people feel that they too can push the boundaries of vulgarity and taboo, and the anonymity of the Internet Age only makes the would-be troll more comfortable in pursuing their mischievous aims. Trolling can take on almost any form, happen anywhere people gather to exchange views and opinions, and can range from mere name-calling and shit-disturbing to in-your-face ambush interviews (and, suffice it to say, everything in between).
Trolling was an issue all Mods had to deal with starting on day one of our training as we carefully dissected what would be considered appropriate submissions for nicknames, profile pics, content submissions for the individual programs etc.
On the first day we aired we were confronted almost immediately with people who were trying to flood our system with pornographic images, vulgar nicknames and a steady flow of provocative, explicit and otherwise offensive messages.
After more than three months, it still happens, and as we’ve been gaining more viewers and more attention, it is unlikely to cease any time soon.
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