On announcing that he was leaving Radio Two after many years the presenter Simon Mayo, famed for his drive time show recently had to make an extraordinary plea to his fans. He asked them to stop bombarding his replacement, the highly respected and talented Jo Wiley with hateful and misogynist abuse via social media.
The ubiquity of such abuse has made the attacks on Jo Wiley sadly unremarkable; most of us have now reluctantly accepted the internet troll as an unpleasant part of every day life.
For those who have to receive such unsolicited hate, it is far from being sadly unremarkable and instead is humiliating, hurtful and often frightening. We now live in a time where the technology that enables instant communication has overtaken our ability to manage it safely or socially.
The most negative and destructive impulses in society are given free reign as a result.
What does the internet troll tell us about life in 2018 then?
The means to transmit aggression and spite works faster than human judgement and can target those that we have never met more effectively than any other form of communication previously devised.
This explains the how, but not the why. Why are there so many thousands of individuals in our society who are enraged by trivial changes to their environment such as the replacement of a radio show host? Why are there so many thousands of people who, instead of processing whatever anger they feel, have to respond with insults and threats? Why are there so many people so desperate to be heard that they have lost control of what they say and who they hurt?
It seems hardly coincidental that these erratic and pathological behaviours go hand in hand with an epidemic of loneliness in our society. We have produced a society of atomised and alienated individuals with worsening mental health and therefore should not be surprised when anti social activity increases.
We have also created a society based on the belief that ruthless individualism and the pursuit of self interest is more than merely common sense, but exists as a virtue in its own right. With this kind of anti social logic driving our actions, it is only a matter of time before morbid symptoms emerge.
The great enabler in all of this behaviour is drugs and alcohol, substances which have already featured in criminal prosecutions of online trolls. However, the far bigger problem is the societal context itself.
Online trolls are, in their own destructive way, attempting to play some role in a society that seems to have very little purpose for them and yet bombards us all with the mantra that we should strive to matter and to fail in this pursuit is a sin.