* I Sproll therefore I Am.

Sprolling the Net (especially YDN)

On one Yale Daily News post today a writer accused me of "trolling".  I replied, "The Anti-Yale does not troll; The Anti-Yale searches the forest for kindling."

Then I looked up the MODERN (i.e. the INTERNET) definition of 'trolling' : "In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking other users into a desired emotional response^[1]"   Wikipedia 

I definitely plead guilty to often being "off-topic".  My whole approach on the Yale Daily News posting board is to broaden the discussion to a town/gown debate, as one who was born and raised in New Haven and who found Yale offensively elitist, sexist, and racist for the first 40 years of my life. *



However, I do not fit the second half of the definition at all: "with the primary intent of provoking other users into a desired emotional  response." 

My greatest satisfactions with the YDN posting board have been when I was engaged in a witty or sardonic repartee or in an actual intellectually worthy  back-and-forth on a topic.  This has happened a few times over the last two and a half years of posting.


 I etsbalished a second  blog "Sparring with the Yale Daily News" to accommodate the overflow from this, The Anti-Yale, blog, since much of my posting with YDN was a distraction to my  mission with  The Anti-Yale.   see Sparring with the Yale Daily News


Unable to plead guilty to "trolling"  I will  combine the word "trolling" with the word  "sparring" ( as in my "Sparring with the Yale Daily News") and create a new word for the INTERNET, which I will gladly plead guilty to: SPROLLING (sparring and trolling).


I sproll through the Yale Daily News articles every day looking for kindling to set fire to the  unfairness I see in the world.  Often that takes the form of an outraged New Haven townie. 


(Sweet irony: this very article is an example of the results of my sprolling the Yale Daily News.)


Sprolleo ergo sum.

Paul D. Keane, M. Div. '80
M.A., M.Ed.

*
I do concede that, post-1985 (my departure from New Haven and Yale) Mr Levin has presided over the egalitarianization of Yale, as much as an elitist entity can become an egalitarian one.




______________________________


NB: I just Googled "sproll" and discovered:  Sproll is a Canadian indie rock band that was formed in 2003 in the city of Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada.

They can have the NOUN, but I claim the VERB: 
I Sproll therefore I Am!


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Troll (Internet)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Do not feed the trolls" and its abbreviation "DNFTT" redirect here. For the Wikimedia essay, see "What is a troll?".

The trollface, sometimes refered as "coolface" or "Problem?", is widely used to represent the act of trolling

 or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.^[2] In addition to the offending poster, the noun troll can also refer to the provocative message itself, as in "that was an excellent troll you posted". While the term troll and its associated action trolling are primarily associated with Internet discourse, media attention in recent years has made such labels highly subjective, with trolling being used to describe intentionally provocative actions outside of an online context. For example, recent media accounts have used the term troll to describe "a person who defaces internet tribute sites with the aim of causing grief to families."^[3][4]