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!