Cyberbullying is not only the bane of public figures and schoolchildren. Anyone who puts something out there — a book, an article, a comment, a song, a Facebook or Myspace page — is potentially the target of digital rotten eggs and spoiled tomatoes. Worse, negative emotions like indignation, contempt and loathing by their nature have energy, raising the probability that this dark matter will manifest itself in the form of action. By contrast, agreement and appreciation are mild sensations, and rarely move people to do anything. Ergo, a disproportion of the feedback you're likely to invite in response to just about anything on the web will be malevolent.

Surely, the most primitive protection against this frenzy of mudslinging is to duck. Accordingly, I do not have a Google Alert on my own name. Unless unavoidably tracking down a particular reference, I don't do searches on "lionel shriver" either. I no longer look up my reviews on Amazon. I boycott social networking sites, since I've a rather old-fashioned notion of what constitutes a "friend". There's a name for everyone else, which is old-fashioned, too: they're called "strangers".

Strangers have always had opinions about us. But one of the culturally unfortunate consequences of the web is a universally raised concern about what other people think of us, along with a deadly access to those views. My solution is old-school, low-tech, but it is still possible to deftly, discreetly take advantage of contemporary interconnectedness without asking to be insulted: I simply don't go looking for vituperation. Granted, whether I read it doesn't change the fact that vats of invective pitched at me are still splattered about the web. But subjective reality is still a reality, and we don't exercise nearly the control we might over this subjective world. Mean graffiti on your Facebook wall? Why not leave the building? It sounds fanciful now, but if enough parents got their kids off the likes of Facebook altogether, forcing nasty pieces of work to go back to insulting your children in person might catch on.

So here's putting the trolls on notice: all those sneering passages they laboured over? I didn't read them. I'll never read them. I may be kidding myself, but I'm content in my denial. Try it sometime. With no new application other than that of our own willpower, we can protect ourselves, and continue to imagine, however naively, that some people are nice.