"...the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck. It's a series of tubes."

Hi, interweb boys and girls and fellow student bloggers. I'm Siddhartha Bajracharya, a senior biology major in CALS, concentrating in microbiology. For what it's worth, I've yet to read the Hesse novel (thanks, I've got a copy already), and my name is pronounced entirely phonetically -- but most people call me Sid by way of convenience.

I don't know really quite what to say by way of further introduction, but from glancing over the previous entries in the Green Blog it looks like I'm one of relatively few non-communications majors here. I suppose my credibility in this class will come from having been a nerd from a tender age. There's a picture of me here in my local library's Internet Club, circa 1996: I'm in the white shirt in the middle of the picture, at about age 10. This is, of course, in the golden age of multimedia CD-ROMs, the Pentium chip, and AOL. The library's 128kbps ISDN line seemed inconceivably fast to me, and I didn't have so much as AOL at home. Today, I suppose I'm a senior geek, working at the CIT HelpDesk with Alex, who posted a ways down, spending my spare time kicking at my salvaged Linux server only to discover it went down because someone unplugged it, and realizing that you and I are probably among the last generation in this country to remember the day when we first got Internet access at home.

There's quite a few bits of Internets phenomena that I'm interested in, but I'll just touch on one here in this short post. I'm particularly interested in antisocial and disruptive behavior online, generally known as 'trolling' in web communities like chatrooms, discussion forums, and blogs, or 'griefing' in gaming communities -- what forms antisociol behavior takes online, what makes it distinctly and radically different from antisocial behavior IRL, who perpetrates these behaviors, and what motivates them. Trolling has had a long history online, appearing in virtually every type of online space Wallace cites, from its earliest appearances on Usenet to modern glorified MUDs like Second Life. Trolling has also taken an incredibly diverse variety of forms. from forum invasions run by the infamous Anonymous (briefly discussed by Jenna), extended taunting of bizarre borderline personalities, as seen on the now-defunct LJDrama blog, to something as simple as friendly-fire player killing in Counter-Strike. Trolls are generally deeply unpopular in the majority of Internet communities (excepting, of course, trolling communities), but trolling remains very common, to the point where being exposed to certain classic trolling techniques has become something of a rite of passage and part of Internet culture among Internet users. Furthermore, for such a well-known part of Internet culture, very little academic work seems to have been done on it (at least in my limited research).