A Rape in Cyberspace

This is my post for the tute discussion this week, but I see Claire has done the same article, so I'll try not to be too repetitive. The article is Julian Dibbell's A Rape in Cyberspace; or How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Tricketer Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database into a Society (2001).

The article describes a tale of crime and punishment which occured within the virtual world of LambdaMOO, a multi-user dimention, or MUD. Dibbell describes the "cyberrape" which occurred in LambdaMOO and the repercussions of this act, raising questions about online-spaces, virtual communities, the mind and body, and ethics. As Dibbel writes:

For the Bungle Affair...asks us to shut our ears momentarily to the techno-utopian ecstasies of West Coast cyberhippies and look without illusion upon the present possibilities for building, in the on-line spaces of this world, societies more decent and free than those mapped onto dirt and concrete and capital.

With this, we might want to think about our own definitions of "community", and can there be a sense of community in a virtual world?

Dibbel points out that for every set of facts in virtual reality, there is the second, complicating, set of "real life" (RL) facts:

No hideous clownsor trickster spirits appear in the RL version of the incident, no voodoo dolls or wizard guns, indeed no rape at all as any RL court of law has yet defined it. The actors in the drama were university students for the most part, and they sat rather undramatically before computer screens the entire time, their only actions a spidery flitting of fingers across standard QWERTY keyboards. No bodies touched.

While reading this article, I couldn't help think of a certain South Park episode, in season 10, Make Love not Warcraft, where the boys band together to take down a certain player who had taken the fun out of the game by powerfully destroying other players. While it was an epic final battle online, the fact remains that in reality, they were just four boys against one overweight man, sitting behind their computers, while their friends played outside. However, as mirrored by the Bungle case in Dibbels article, the violation is very much felt in real life, despite the offence occuring in a virtual world. Dibbel's article asks us to question these ideas about the mind and body:

"Where does the body end and the mind begin?" young Quastro asked, amid recurring attempts to fine-tune differences between real and virtual violence. "Is not the mind a part of the body?" "In MOO, the body IS the mind."

Is the body no longer relevent in a virtual context? And if not, can ethical behavior still exist?

What did you guys think about how the Bungle case was sorted? Is anyone part of an online community today, and what would likely happen if a character like Mr Bungle entered it?

That's it from me for now. I'll leave you guys with this old but extremely amusing and insightful article about some bizzare online communities.