Reflections II

Looking Backwards, Looking Forward: Cyberculture Studies 1990-2000, by David Silver

Silver describes the study of cyberculture as it has developed during the 1990s, dividing it into three stages. My part of the anonymity project is about trolls, so I would like to make a few comments in regard to trolls within the context of this article.

The story of Mr. Bungle on LambdaMoo is definitely an account of an early troll. Silver touches on the fact that the Internet lacks a physical environment. This, in addition to allowing people to make up new identities, also allows them to go without identities at all. A lack of physical environment makes it difficult to enforce rules of conduct and control for undesirable behavior (in the case of Mr. Bungle, the worst that the perpetrator suffered was the deletion of his/her account on the community). This combination of characteristics of an online community makes trolling so easy, I believe. I have thought about the lack of accountability and repercussions as possible motivations for troll behavior, and this case certainly illustrates that. Mr. Bungle’s actions were clearly against the community’s established rules of acceptable behavior, a distinct set of social norms, yet there was very little that could be done about it. Still today, there is not much one can do about trolls aside from deleting their work or banning their accounts. It is doubtful that trolls even consider it risky behavior; belonging to the community they troll must not mean much to them since they are attacking its members, and therefore the threat of potentially being banned really should not affect them much. So where’s the thrill of danger in that? I think I can rule that out as a motivation….

Regarding critical cyberculture studies, Silver mentions a study be McLaughlin et al., in which “they deduce seven categories of reproachable behavior, including novice use of technology, bandwidth waste, ethical violations, and inappropriate language” (p. 6). I would argue that the exact nature and relative importance of each of these categories varies from community to community. For example, what is “inappropriate language” on 4chan? It is obviously much different than the “inappropriate language” elsewhere, such as on a self-help forum. Trolls know what is appropriate behavior, and they deliberately go against it. So the same question remains: why is violating rules, even unwritten ones, so entertaining?

Post-Human Anthropology by Neil Whitehead

Reading Whitehead’s article brought up some fundamental issues of studying the so-called “Internet culture.” Typically, cultures, while obviously constantly changing, are thought to exist in time and space. But there is no physical location for the Internet. Similarly, everyone knows there are lots of people “on” the Internet, yet no one is physically there. All that is required for someone to take part in the Internet is the necessary equipment. Whitehead’s “I am like you” approach therefore makes sense. To study people “on” the Internet, one must become a person “on” the Internet (if not already), and therefore enter Internet culture the same way everyone else does: by starting up the connection.

There is also the dilemma of the historical “instability of the category of human” (p. 22). Early explorers and colonizers wondered whether to classify the people they encountered/extorted/enslaved as human or not. In the present time we use a special, dehumanizing term for a person who behaves in a certain way that is against accepted social norms (that would be “troll”). The word itself, previously reserved for mythical, unpleasant creatures inhabiting the underside of bridges, implies “not human.” So I wonder: do non-trolls consider trolls to be inhuman? Or at the very least, less human than themselves?