Rape or Internet Terrorism?

OK, I'm aware that this may be a stretch, but I am still not sold that Mr. Bungle has committed rape. For the matter, I am still not sold that internet rape is even possible, sexual harassment if anything. This is not to say that I am condemning his actions, I just think this atrocity shouldn't take the name of rape for several reasons. 

For starters, I find that calling this situation a rape very disrespectful to those who have been actually been raped in real life. Rape is not a term that I am comfortable just throwing around. Real life rape usually involves a person who uses force and violence to have some form of sex with another against their will. Not only is there the physical damage done, but there is that sense of insecurity of ones self after a rape, an insecurity that makes the victim change the way they live their daily life's. There is no such thing as "virtual rape." At anytime, these people could have at least walked away an not have subjected themselves to the words the Mr. Bungle was saying through his Voodoo program. If one thinks that any real life victim of rape could walk away then they just do not understand the severity of rape. Like I stated earlier, I am not condemning the actions of Mr. Bungles, I am simply arguing Dibbell's use of the word rape. So if it isn't rape, there has to be another term that Dibbell could use to replace rape.

The first thing I thought of when I read this was sexual harassment, but then I thought to myself that it is bigger then just virtual sexual harassment. LambdaMoo is a fully function-able community that has values and beliefs that can be found in communities worlwide, virtual or real world. Mr. Bungles actions didn't just affect a single user, it affected an entire community. It left the tight-knit group living in fear every time they logged on to the LambdaMoo servers. In todays day and world, post 9/11 that is, the term terrorism is thrown around a lot. Now, it is tough to pinpoint the exact definition of what terrorism is, but I have formed my own opinion of what it is; Any action where a person or a group of people have gone out of their way to make another group of people afraid to live their daily lives. If we use this definition, then I see no reason why Mr. Bungles actions should not be classified as a cyperterrorism. He left this community living in fear to the point where they had to change the way they operated on a daily basis. Simialar to the way the United States changed many of their laws after 9/11 (the way we fly, the Sarbanes-Oxley act, etc.), the LambdaMoo community was forced to changed they lived in their lives within this virtual world. I don't disagree with any of the opinions or t he way that Dibbell decided to tell this story, I just disagree with the decision to refer to this incident as a rape, rather I'd prefer to see this called a form of cyber terrorism or at the very least, an ugly case of sexual harassment. 

Second Life Success Story

When we started our class discussions about Second Life a couple of weeks ago, I thought the whole thing was bizarre. A weird addiction, one in which people create alternate identities and seemingly spend as much time working on their new identities as they do on their real life persona. After our first discussion on Second Life, I had to fly home to be with my family, where I quickly saw the positive uses of these virtual worlds.

While sitting in my Aunts house, I was hanging out with my 37-year-old cousin who is severely mentally challenged. As much as I hate to call him a burden, this is essentially what he has become to my Aunt and Uncle who are both in their Mid-Sixties. He essentially has the mental capacity of an 11-year-old who has a hard time counting the change in his pocket. For the last thirty seven years, my Aunt and Uncle have had to bring him everywhere, their life has been entirely centered around him. He has no friends, no life outside of their small Trenton suburb home. One of his only interactions with the outside world is when he and my Grandfather go to the Yankees minor league games, the Trenton Thunder. That was until I helped him open up a Second Life account.

I called him yesterday to see if I could ask him a couple of questions about how Second Life has changed his life. Luckily he agreed, but I promised him that I wouldn't give out the name of his Second Life avatar because he doesn't want people in his new community to know that he is, in real life, mentally challenged, a request that I am going to honor. Although he has only been in this virtual world for a short time, I have heard from many relatives that he has never been happier and has given my Aunt and Uncle a freedom they haven't experienced in a long, long time. This is what my cousin Chris has to say about his new life in his new world. Mind you, I had to change a lot of his wording so it made more sense, so none of these are direct quotes.

He was nervous, scared that the people in this new virtual world would discriminate against him like people have done his whole life. He was very hesitant to talk to women, or anybody for that matter. He spent the first couple of days just exploring, trying to get the hang of how to control his new world. Luckily for him, my younger cousin lives down the street from him and was very familiar with technology and the Second Life community, so he helped Chris out a lot. Finally, he started talking with people, started making friends with all sorts of people. He started telling me about this bunny that he became friends with (we know them as furries). He was telling me about the friends he met that would talk baseball with him and how much easier it was to communicate online then it was if he was face-to-face with them. Then, whispering into the phone as if he didn't want my Aunt to hear, he started telling me about how he saw people having sex and how he finally gained the confidence to talk to women. Now, all he does is go around talking to females, something that he has never had the confidence to do in the real world. He spends a fair amount of time on Second Life, because as he says, "they like me, they treat me normal there." Real world or not, everyone deserves to be treated normally and I am really proud of my cousin that he has finally found a community that he feels a part of. 

 

Virtual Cross-Dressing??

Sherry Turkle has become just another author in a long list of authors that has failed to convince me that the Internet is not the home of the social outcast of the world. In her book Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, the chapter titled “Tinysex and Gender Trouble” only proves to me that the Internet is where all of these misfits go to try to find an “identity,” a word that has been tossed around quite often in our class. In the past, I have been hard on the people who use the Internet as an escape. After reading this chapter, I have realized that I have not been hard enough on these virtual nerds, who in “real-life” are also nerds. Which begs the question, what are they actually escaping?

Turkle documents her efforts as she tries to construct her own online persona and along the way notices some very disturbing facts including virtual cross-dressing. The weirdest part, is that Turkle tries to defend these cross-dressers by saying things like “Boys, after all, were not called prudes if they were too cool to play kissing games” or “In Shakespeare time, there was yet another turn because all women’s parts were played by boys.” After all, boys are never too cool to play kissing games and if they were, they would be called gay, not prudes. Also, in Shakespeare’s time, men played the woman’s characters because women weren’t allowed to play any part, which hardly makes those men cross dressers. I digress though and want to focus more on what I find to be the most confusing aspect about this new epidemic. The part I am most confused about is how people think that for a second that skills used online will be able to correlate into the real life situations. Maybe one is not sure about their gender, so they explore it online to they point where they think they are ready for the change. They then get this expensive sex change that takes years to fully complete and when they get into the real world they realize that people still look at them oddly, driving them back to their lairs where they continue to play online games trying to escape their own reality.

I am sorry if this offends anyone, but sometimes the truth hurts. A 35-year-old hiding behind a computer screen in his mom’s basement is pathetic. Lets face it people, the behavior that is seen on MUDs challenges everything that society views as weird. I hear people say, “Well, maybe society isn’t right, who are they to judge?” Society is the purest form of democracy, where opinions are not just stated but have to go through hundreds of millions of people before they are accepted as a societal norm. So I leave all the Internet losers with this message: You have two legs and a heart so you can go outside and do activity in the REAL WORLD. You have a penis because you are supposed to have sex with REAL PEOPLE. You were blessed with natural forms of communication so you can interact with REAL PEOPLE. It is pathetic that people live their lives in fear of themselves, especially when they have all the tools they need to succeed in the REAL WORLD. So stop cross-dressing online because you guys are not the only ones who cannot handle the stresses of the real world, your just the only ones pathetic enough to resort to changing who you are. We all have problems, get over it, that’s called life in the real world!

MUDding vs. Smoking the Ganja Green

The first thing that comes to mind while reading Howard Rheingold’s chapter “Multi-User Dungeons and Alternate Identities” was how bizarre these internet communities are. I’m sure for every non-MUDder, the same thought rings true every time a discussion on internet games comes up (or if you’re like me, where internet gaming rarely comes up, you keep your opinions buried deep inside so you don’t offend anybodies feelings). Something else popped into my head, a different type of thought that was spurred by Rheingold saying “is this a dangerous form of addiction?” Well that got me thinking, is it? Are MUDs any different then smoking pot? I did a little research and my findings surprised me a little bit.

Legality aside, what are the key differences between playing a MUD game and smoking that reefer? I poked around the internet and stumbled across a marijuana fact sheet published by the ADA (Division of American Drug Abuse http://www.well.com/user/woa/fspot.htm) that is actually posted on the WELL network, apparently it’s not a small world anymore, sorry Disney. Here is one of the questions asked to this doctor:

What about psychological dependence on marijuana?

Long-term regular users of marijuana may become psychologically dependent. They may have a hard time limiting their use, they may need more of the drug to get the same effect, and they may develop problems with their jobs and personal relationships. The drug can become the most important aspect of their lives.

I'm no doctor, but this can easily be changed after reading this Rheingold article to say something like this:

What about psychological dependence on Multi-User Dungeons?

Long-term regular MUDders may become psychologically dependent and obsessive with a particular game. They may have a hard time limiting their use, they may need more of the game to get the same effect, and they may develop problems with their jobs and personal relationships. The game can become the most important aspect of their lives.

All joking aside now, there is something to be said about this new and dangerous form of addiction. Smoking weed is commonly looked down upon by teachers and parents, with good reasons. Weed appears to make users lazy and stupid even though there is limited scientific information that proves that to be true. There are also very limited health risks that a user faces while smoking pot. I’ve seen firsthand how real a weed addiction, although purely psychological, can affect someone. On the other hand, I’ve also seen how much more dangerous it is to be addicted to a game then it is to be addicted to weed. MUDs take up hours of a user’s life and before they even know it they’ve wasted a whole day. Online gaming is a form of distraction, one that may not “get you high” but one that limits the way one lives their lives, ones REAL LIFE, not one of the other three they have online. I’m in no way advocating the use of marijuana, rather I’m pointing out that maybe drugs are not the most dangerous thing facing our youth in the future, maybe online gaming will become the next great epidemic to plague a youth that has already been heavily-saturated with the use of technology. Are drugs now becoming a retro problem for todays youth? Only time can tell, stay tuned folks.

THANK YOU, Mr. Rheingold...

Indirectly, Howard Rheingold has reinforced every notion I have about using the internet to escape reality. I say indirectly because he is arguing quite the opposite of what I am about to go into, but the points he uses make my argument more solid. I will be focusing on the beginning of the introduction as in typical Rheingold fashion the argument becomes extremely diluted and repetitive. Rheingold talks about his experiences on the WELL network (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link) and all the different people he has met on the site. Here’s my beef, as I have voiced several times in class already, these are random people that I have heard time and time again referred to as “friends.” Not once did Rheingold refer to any of these online people as his friends rather he called them “invisible friends,” meaning they aren’t there. He continues on by saying, “I had contended with these [invisible friends], shot the invisible breeze around the electronic water cooler, shared alliances and formed bonds, fallen off my chair laughing with them, become livid with anger at some of them. But there wasn’t a recognizable face in the house. I had never seen them before.” Sounds like times one would have with their friends while hanging out, the major difference is that in real life, you actually share experiences with each other; you can go out and do things with each other. Using Rheingold, I will show why these interactions are not normal behavior for any human.

A common abbreviation found on the WELL is IRL, which stands for In Real Life. Now, this argument of using the internet to escape ones reality has been shot down several times in class, but here it is in plain writing. Rheingold’s admitting it, anyone who has ever used the abbreviation is admitting it and our professor has admitted it without even knowing it. Creating an alternative identity on the internet is a pathetic way to escape ones reality. Not only does this kind of interaction take up a lot of your time, but it limits you to be sitting in front of your computer. While sitting on your computer, you’re missing out on everything that your natural reality offers you. Exercise, intercourse and nature are a few that come to mind as I think about the things I could be doing with my “real-life” instead of creating a fake life I’m more comfortable in. I’m not saying that an open exchange of information is a bad thing; I actually think that it is a great medium to exchange information. I find it weird that there are people who have to make friends on the internet because they can’t do it in real-life. This is a very harsh criticism and I’m sure that it will face a lot of opposition, but living a duel-life doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense to me. If you are not comfortable with your own reality, why take the time to create another one? Why don’t you work on the reality you currently live in so you don’t feel like you have to start over online.

We Are All Stupider!

Andrew Keen’s chapter “the noble amateur” takes a deeper look into amateur journalism on the internet. While this is the first I’ve read of Keen, I am fairly confident that he would agree with me that the internet has made us all more stupid. Although the reading really only covers the pitfalls of amateur journalism, including misinformation and real-media expendability, I want to delve deeper into the effects amateur journalism and the internet in general have on society as a whole.

For starters, Keen makes several good points that I have found to be evident in our class. Keen claims that bloggers and other amateur journalists “are the digital equivalent of online gated communities where all the people have identical views and the whole conversation is mirrored in a way that is reassuringly familiar.” So our professor goes online to talk to other popular culture professors about what she should put on her syllabus. She has found a community that she is comfortable in because they share many of the same points of view, or POV in internet slang. Well here’s the problem with that, that’s one side of the popular culture argument. Keens article is the first example that we have looked over that is challenging the ideas of popular culture. This class has become an environment where the internet can do no wrong, has no downside. Going online to a community that shares liberal ideals concerning internet use by society makes it seem like we are learning biased information, which we are. Keen is giving the other side to the internet that we have yet to and probably won’t even touch in this class. Amateur journalism is an unreliable source of information as often times the knowledge is skewed and based off of public opinion then passed off as truth. Though there are biases in mainstream media, the resources and connections they have trump that of amateur journalist.

Mainstream media has also fallen victim to amateur journalism. Whether it is Wikipedia forcing Britannica to lay-off workers or media having to clarify rumors spread by bloggers, the role of mainstream is taking a hit. After the Tsunami that destroyed the surrounding areas of the Indian Ocean, amateurs started claiming to have taken pictures of the destruction which major newspapers began to publish. In this article published online, http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=195680&area=/insight/insight__columnists/, it shows the newspapers that had to apologize because it used these pictures taken by amateurs that ended up being fake. Thus, showing a major pitfall of amateur journalism, who are you supposed to believe? We as a society are more stupid because we are ignorant to the fact that information posted on blogs and Wikipedia is generally an opinion opposed to factual information.

Convergance Culture!

Henry Jenkins’s introduction chapter of his book “Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide delves into the development of telecommunication within society, but more importantly, how society is blending new technologies in an effort to make their lives easier. The blending of technologies is an interesting concept that gets covered briefly in the introduction paragraph. Two sentences jumped out at me while I was reading, an it is not because they were underlined but more interesting. “Consumers are learning how to use these different media technologies [like the internet, cell phones, etc.] to bring the flow of media more fully under their control and to interact with other consumers. The promises of this new media environment raise expectations of a freer flow of ideas and content.” I think the idea of consumers using technology to be more informed is pretty cool. After I read that section, I began to think about my grandparents as odd as that sounds. Every time I go to their house, I am helping them with little things on the Internet. Elderly people tend not to use a lot of technology mainly because they didn’t have it for the majority of their lives. Now, as media technology continues more elderly are using the Internet http://www.eurescom.de/message/messageJun2005/The_digital_divide_of_the_elderly.asp. I found a European study about this very subject. A lot of the statistics are very impressive and completely back my argument up. Only 21% of Europeans between the age of 55 and 74 are using the Internet opposed to the 75% of the 15 to 24 year olds. I can only imagine that our numbers are very similar to those of Europe but don’t anticipate that number to stay so low for very much longer.