Academic internet trolling
If you ever asked yourself: do academics act as troller online?
Yes, they do, sadly.
For me, this is when an academic title is not enough, they need to make sure verbally they will not be defied, questioned, a discussion become a competion of ranking. Their own internal misery must be reassured by putting out their academic scores.
Recently, I have received the following comment from someone declaring himself as PhD candidate on Columbia University, I refuse to accept that this is the common behavior of someone from this university:
Did you express any viewpoint at all except your confusing quote with grammatical errors?
Is he right? most likely yes! and this not the point here.
The fact you are right does not give you the right to forget you have another human being on the other side. By the way, I do not remember hiring someone to proofreading my essay! 😂
What is curious: when someone stopped you on a corridor and corrected you on real life, without a formal request and orientation?
Curiously, people online tend to act like they can say whatever they cannot say on real life, since they do not know the person, the person is just an avatar, a name on a profile. We do need to add online education on people curricula.
On Medium, I do not expend as much time with an essay as I do with academic writing, and books. It takes me weeks to review a book, for academic writing, I generally separate weeks to final touches; remember on my undergrad, after weeks correcting a paper, typos still appeared on the final print, I have seen several books with typos from famous researchers. The difference is that we tend to be nicer with people higher in hierarchy as we judge it: “kiss the ass up, and kick the ass down”.
The magic of Medium is that you can make mistakes, in name of expressing yourself, and I am confortable in making mistakes. Most of the mistakes are due to lack of attention, any careful proofreading would eliminate them. Am I going to that based on this feedback? nope! I do make proofreading on my articles, but if they prove to be worth it (i.e., get engagement, or the topic is important). I have done a conscious decision: typos will not stop me from writing; and this person should keep his decision of typos stopping him to himself, he goes another mistaque fr y to comet, instead of concentrating on your PhD.
You may say I am emotional when replying: yes, I was. But now I am curious, and I have found a couple of books to read on trolling:
Why someone, as PhD candidate, from an elite university, would behave like internet troll?
Even though I do write about the topic, I may have fallen initially to the trap of the following cognitive bias:
Cognitive bias (elite university tendency): we tend to associate morality to people from elite universities
There is no evidence that elite universities hold just moral people. They just hold the elite, creating the meritocracy traps. Intelligence is anywhere, any smart people know that.
Lucky enough, this person has a lot to learn, and hopefully, by the end of his PhD, he will learn to be humble and more productive when giving feedback; of course, he may become an *****, there are plenty of them in the academia; and also plenty of good people, like anywhere.
Coming back to the question: I do not have the answer, leave your comments, and I have downloaded a couple of books, and should I learn something, I will be glad to share!
Why someone, as PhD candidate, from an elite university, would behave like internet troll?
Good question! 🤗😎
