The Clever Badger I'm not dead yet!

The Badger’s Guide To Internet Fauna, Volume 1

The internet is a wide and varied environment, with a tremendously diverse group of denizens.  In many cases, there's a layer of anonymity to the internet, so it's not always apparent who you're really interacting to.  In some ways, you may come to think of people you interact with on the internet in terms of their behaviors.

Many of those behaviors are innocent in the sense that the person exhibiting the behavior probably doesn't realize exactly what he or she is doing.  A fine example of this is when someone new to the internet¹ sends YOU AN E-MAIL TYPED IN ALL CAPS AND POSSIBLY CLASHING MULTICOLOR FONTS.  . 

Other things that fall into the same category are naïve but well-intentioned warnings about internet threats:

WARNING!!! If you receive a message from someone named Stabby McEvil O'Bastard with an attachment named "800 Ways to Barbecue Kittens", DON'T OPEN IT!!!!1111!!!!  It's a virus that will infect your computer, melt your hard drive, and then crawl out of your monitor and steal your soul when you're asleep and the world will end in 2012!!!!   Immediately forward this message to everyone you've ever met to make sure they're safe from this!!

Ummm.  Yeah.  Snopes.com should be a default bookmark in every browser.  Before you get your boxers in a twist over some alleged threat to freedom, the internet, and kittens, take a minute and check into it.  This sort of behavior seems very common on social networking sites like Facebook, which leads me to my next category:

Conflation of personal and professional interests in awkward settings.  If you run a business with a web presence, more power to you.  When you start weaving that business into your personal web presence, it can get weird and annoying really quickly.  An acquaintance of mine just got her real estate license.  She lives in a small town in another state.  Many of her Facebook friends do not live in her state.  A huge number of her postings these days are descriptions of homes she's listing.  In her town.  Which are of extremely limited interest to anyone not in her town.  Which is most people.²  Just set up a separate page for your business, and use your personal page to keep in touch with folks.  It'll probably work better for you anyway, and you won't alienate the people who friended you because they're actually interested in hearing things about, say, your family or something.

Most of the interactions on social networking sites like Facebook are voluntary, so it's pretty easy to ignore things that don't interest me, but sometimes it seems that for every one status update or posted link that is interesting, there are several dozen "I'm bored now" status messages to wade through.  The signal-to-noise ratio is pretty low.

Enter forums.  Forums give their members the opportunity to engage in strident argumentation with people they've never met over topics that most people don't care about, such as the number of spines on Godzilla's back in the original film.³ Forums also take the following equation to its limit: Internet + Anonymity = Assclown.  Some of the ways this equation may be expressed are:

• The Asserter.  Makes claims without making any effort to back them up.  When challenged, will often react defensively by releasing a cloud of new claims, much like a squid releasing ink into the water to escape a threat.  The Asserter occasionally proves useful by providing fodder for discussion. 
• The flip-side of the Asserter is the Demander of References.  The Demander of References will challenge any point in a discussion which he feels are not adequately supported, even relatively non-controversial points like the color of the sky or the chemical composition of water.  It is not uncommon for the same individual to assume the role of both the Asserter and the Demander of References, often in the same discussion.
• The Reflector.  The Reflector is less common than the Assertor or the Demander of References.  The usual behavior of the Reflector is to use a valid source to make an invalid claim (he might, for example, claim that a 95% confidence interval in some reported data is the same as a 95% chance of any single value in the range being correct).  When someone points out his error, he'll appear to accept the explanation, but then turn it around and attempt to claim that the new interpretation still supports his point.
• The Goalpost Shifter.  Superficially similar to the Reflector, the Goalpost Shifter will make an invalid claim, and will appear to accept (all or part of) the explanation, but will then retreat far enough from his original position to require a different specific explanation.  Goalpost Shifters can be quite skilled and crafty.
• The Lunatic.  Most forums have a certain number of regular members that are the equivalent of the creepy guy on the bus sitting in the back mumbling to himself.  They randomly show up in discussions and make bizarre, off-topic comments that only make sense within the confines of their delusional architectures.  They're harmless for the most part, but on occasion figure out how to start new threads, at which point the become the equivalent of the creepy guy on the bus who forgets his pants every morning.
• The Walk-off.  The Walk-off will engage in an argument for a while, often quite civilly, but will at some point abruptly leave the discussion.  He will then go to either his blog or to another forum that agrees with his ideology and declare that he won the argument that he walked away from.  Crucially, he won't link back to his "victory", and may well not even mention the other venue by name.  It's common for these obnoxious gits to build up quite an impressive resume of "victories" that evaporate like mist in the sunlight if you take the time to dig in and verify them. 
• The Smoldering Ember.   These guys can be fun.  They give every appearance of being articulate, intelligent individuals who are normally very polite (though perhaps a big condescending).  However, beneath the surface lurks a raging beast that can be unleashed if you happen to press the right combination of buttons.  Maybe you express your opinion that his preferred expert is a barely literate charlatan, or maybe you point out that he's selectively applying his logic to everything but his own position, but in the end he explodes in a tirade of profanity-laced invective so scorching that people from other forums join yours just to watch the fireworks.  The Smoldering Ember often vanishes for a while after that - either from a formal suspension or in an arrogant huff - and when he returns will once again be wearing his mask of sanity.  When the Smoldering Ember goes off, he frequently reveals new, heretofore unknown, buttons that will subsequently be pushed.

I consider blogs to be like extremely personal and somewhat less compartmentalized versions of forums, and so we should expect to see quite a bit of overlap between the rogues in both venues.  A key difference is that forums are often very partisan, so discussions on one forum don't often spill over to other forums (unless the discussion is about the forums themselves), but discussions can start on one blog and drift from blog to blog depending on who gets spun up enough to pick up the topic.  This dynamic leads to a couple of interesting variants.

• The Grenadier is a specialized descendant of the Walk-off.  At some point in a discussion (which may be ranging over multiple blogs), the Grenadier will retreat to his own blog, where he will continue the discussion with himself.  He'll accomplish this feat by abandoning the other active discussions without warning, and will pick up where he left off at his own place.  The problem is that he won't tell anyone else that he's done it, and he won't provide any links back into the original discussion.  He'll then start tossing verbal grenades at the other bloggers who, unaware that they're being pelted, won't have anything to say.  The Grenadier will then spin this silence as evidence of his superior logic and argumentation skills when in fact it's just evidence that everyone else thought he went away. 
• The Recruiter.  Occasionally someone in a blog discussion will go out and recruit his friends for help, particularly if the discussion isn't going his way.  These friends will engage in the discussion by repeating the same points that the Recruiter has been making, but slightly out of phase - Recruiter makes Point A.  Blogger responds to Point A.  Recruiter makes Point B.  Friend 1 makes Point A (again).  Blogger responds to Point B and to Point A (again).  Recruiter makes Point C.  Friend 1 makes Point B, and Friend 2 shows up and makes Point A (again), and so forth, with the result being that the blogger must choose between addressing the same points over and over or ignoring the repetitions.  Eventually, the blogger will give up because he's arguing with a bunch of tree stumps and write a movie review, and the Recruiter and his friends will slink off to their blogs and declare victory.
• The Batshit Crazy Canadian Computer Salesman Who Comment-Spams With Incoherent Screeds And Threatens To Kill You.  There's only one of these that I know of. 

There are, of course, other sorts out there, but many of those lack the entertainment potential as the ones listed here, and are often more difficult to spot.  They're kinda like Pokemon in that respect.

- Jay
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¹They still exist. They frequently go by names such as "Grandma", "Grandpa", and at least in one case, "Dad".  As far as I'm aware, my father has never touched a computer, let alone surfed the internet. I've seen him answer the phone, but never dial it. He probably belongs to a support group for technophobic older gentlemen.

²I know a number of realtors. Most are very nice people and I have no real problem with them trying to do their job. I realize that the people who succeed in that business tend to be the more agressive ones, but really, some of them need to dial it back a little.

³The sheer number of web forums out there is astonishing. There are forums for movies, TV shows, music, science, religion, mythology.

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