How very interesting that you are seeing this notice at all. This can mean only one of two things. Either you scrolled up from where you entered this screen, or some unethical person who thinks that he's clever gave you this url, hoping that he'd get you to miss our notice as to why it is that copyright law isn't being broken, in this article. Nice try, but no go.
You want to know what that is? Well, OK, since you ask ...
One of the more annoying forms of trolling that one encounters online is something that some of us like to call "the dormitory telephone game". Let me show you how it's played offline, and you'll see what I'm referring to.
Here's an example, from an old dormitory of mine. (Hence the name, right?). There was somebody, let's call him "George", who later became notorious for his fondness for backstabbing any guy in the building who was better looking than him, which is to say almost all of them, hence his (eventual) notoriety. One day, one of his roommates lent a hotpot to a neighbor. We had these cheap little dorm fridges which would ice over at the drop of a hat, and the neighbor had some stuff in the freezer compartment which would spoil if he just let everything thaw out. So, he needed some hot water to melt enough ice to open the freezer compartment drawer, and a pan to catch the nasty meltwater that came out. Common problem.
George was looking for a fight, and his bad reputation wasn't made yet, so he decided to play a small game. With his roommates, and a few guests over, he placed a phonecall to the neighbor.
(Phone rings. Neighbor picks up his phone).
Neighbor : "Hello".
George : "We're waiting to use the hotpot. And the pan".
Neighbor : "No problem. I almost have the door open. Give me another few minutes, and I've have the door open, and the pan cleaned out".
George : "What's the hold-up?"
Neighbor : "That the door isn't open, yet? Besides which, I don't think that you want to handle what's dripping into this pan. Yicch !"
George : "Calm down, Patrick. There's no need for profanity".
Neighbor : "What are you talking about? What profanity? George, have you gone off your medication?"
George : "Oh, yeah ? You're going to kick my a**? Maybe I ought to kick your a** !"
Neighbor : "George, calm down. Nobody's going to kick your a**. Good, the door is just about open."
George : "No, I don't want my parents to get hurt. What are saying? Stop screaming at me!"
(hangs up)
People in George's room look shocked. One of the guests turns to George and says:
"Geez, what a psycho. Call campus security, George, you shouldn't have to put up with that".
As P.T. Barnum once said, nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public. A greatly bewildered neighbor dropped by, a few minutes later, with the pot and pan nicely cleaned, only to get told to get out. Word got around the floor about his "psychotic behavior".
The suggestibility of one's fellow man can be a wonder to behold. The guests in that room went on to tell tales of this horrible rant the neighbor went on, and they seemed genuinely convinced that they had heard all of this, no matter how strongly logic indicated that they could not possibly have done so.
Guest : "You need to get that psycho Pat off this floor before he hurts somebody".
R.A. : "So, you heard him say these things?" (*)
Guest : "Yes"
R.A. : "Who was on the phone?"
Guest : "George".
R.A. : "How do you know that George wasn't the one who flipped out?"
Guest : "I was right there with him. I would have heard him, if he said things like that".
R.A. : "You were with George, and yet you heard Pat, four doors down and through a solid brick wall? Does really good hearing run in your family, or has George torn out his dorm phone and replaced it with a speakerphone? How did you hear this?"
Guest : "Look, man, I know what I heard".
The remarkable thing is that he didn't know what he had heard. In the face of physical reality, which clearly showed that he could not possibly have heard what he thought he heard, he simply went into denial. Such is the power of willful stupidity.
The online version of "the dormitory telephone game" is remarkably similar, in a lot of ways. The main difference is the medium. When somebody is playing this less-than-charming game on the telephone, offline, one is responding to spoken remarks that the other person didn't actually make, in the hope that one's audience will "fill in the blanks" and make the guesses about what the other person is saying, that one wants them to make. In the online version, one responds to written remarks that the other person didn't actually make and hopes for the same.
One major difference, however, is that for the online version to work, one's audience has to be either far more stupid, far more weak willed, or far less concerned with the truth, than the audience for the offline version needs to be. When one is speaking to somebody else on the telephone, generally speaking, the other people in the room can't hear the person that one is talking to. They are forced to rely on one's word as to what the other person is saying, at least temporarily. With the online version, the posts that one is replying to in a misleading fashion are out for all to see. The audience is perfectly free to look for itself.
What a telling comment about many of the people one meets online, that so many will refuse to do just that.
Click here to continue.
(*) In case you've never lived on campus : "R.A." is short for "resident assistant", in the dormitories. (The R.A. is responsible for handling problems on one of the floors in a dorm).