Trolling makes us all Truman

The hopefully minor number who do venture an opinion on who-did-what-and-when will be wary of crossing the line from opinion into personal abuse or slanderous illegality. They will understand that they are making public declarations which can be read by anyone – if not now, then in the future.

Tweets and similar messages appear to be disposable and temporary, because they take only a few seconds to construct and send.

They form, however, a potentially permanent record. What goes digital normally stays digital, either because we forget to expunge what we've entered, or because it is almost impossible even for experts to totally remove material from computers. Somehow, a digital echo always seems to remain.

Facebook claims more than 1.3 billion registered accounts. On Twitter, an estimated 58 million messages, or tweets, are published every day.

The U.S. Library of Congress reportedly collects all published tweets, with the aim of passing the records to future generations of historians. In an age when letter writing and the like are reduced to almost zero, social media will provide a rich source of research data on the state of the world in our time.

Without recognising this, or in spite of it, some people feel free to share provocative, angry and, in many cases, slanderous remarks about people they've never met and whose stories they know only in a very fragmentary way.

The laws surrounding slander, personal abuse and stalking have been slow to catch up with the new realities of social media. Even now, police do not have the resources – or probably the training – to follow up all but the most vicious of personal attacks online.

The tragedy of all this is that some so-called 'trolls' will never have set out to become agents of vilification. They will have grown into the role incrementally, as they have gradually come to believe themselves invulnerable or hidden from public view.

They may have come to believe that only their ideas were in the public space and that even if their identities became known, their online opinions would be divorced in the public mind from their true, offline characters.

This is a dangerous assumption in the age of 'onlife' – the blending together of the online and offline worlds through near ubiquitous use of digital gadgets.

So much of our lives now involve digital technologies at some level; so many of our conversations are mediated by keyboard, screen and headset, that we blur the lines between artifice and reality.

Indeed, we sometimes mistakenly believe that the internet is in fact about artifice; that what we do in the cybersphere is somehow less real than how we behave in 'real' life. Where once 'artificial' and 'reality' were words we wouldn't naturally fit together, artificial reality is now an accepted part of our daily discourse.